Eternal Cultivation Of Alchemy

Momo’s nervousness waned. She sat before Red Dawn, calm and collected, ready to make the pill. The first ingredient went in, ready for her to refine it.

The ingredients for the Sorrow Devouring Pill were easy to handle due to their weaker energy, so refining it wasn’t even a trouble. All she really had to do was maintain the speed and heat, and everything else would fall right into place.

As such, she made absolutely no mistake at all.

The second ingredient went in, and she refined it as well. The energy released mixed with the previous energy under her control, and it was almost so simple how they mixed. It was as simple as holding sand and letting it pass through your fingers. She barely had to do anything. She simply nudged them, and the energy mixed on their own.

It was such a wonderful feeling to see that happen.

Part of her relished in this feeling, while a part of her worried something was wrong.

Momo placed in the third ingredient and refined it per the recipe. The ingredient refined easily, releasing its energy that mixed together with the existing energy in the cauldron.

Momo knew here how they were supposed to mix, and so she controlled them to mix together, and they did so quite easily again.

This surprised her.

Momo had made this pill before, so she knew what she had to do. And yet, never before had this pill been so easy to make. She was still in the starting phase, and yet she could tell there was something different.

Let alone this pill, no other pill she had ever made had felt this simple to her to make. The simpleness of the matter worried her.

Was she perhaps not in the right mindset? Why was it all so easy?

‘I can’t stop now,’ Momo thought, continuing.

The fourth ingredient went in, and Momo refined it the same way. Around this time was when she finally began realizing what was happening. As she felt the energy from the fourth ingredient mix into the combined energy, she got a strong feeling that she was not the only one making the pill.

It was at this point that Momo realized that whatever was happening was not something for her to worry about, but rather something for her to be happy about.

The reason why it was so easy to mix the energy was not because something was wrong with her, but because something else was helping her.

Her Dao.

Because Momo was making a pill that was meant for fighting poison, by mere coincidence, she was employing the Dao of Detoxification while making the pill, so whenever it came to the energy that would be the thing that fought the poison, her Dao aided her in completing it.

Momo now began consciously enforcing the Dao and suddenly what remained got even easier.

For the physical part of the pill, the active refinement and handling of powder, Momo had to do it on her own. But on the energy part, she could employ her Dao.

That was incredible.

Momo went through the rest of the ingredients one after another, easily refining them. Her other Daos, such as the Dao of Heat and the Dao of Fire, were also quite helpful throughout the process of pill making.

Momo felt quite good about this pill. Never before had she made a pill where she could tell from the beginning that the result was going to be great.

This time, she could.

She could tell that she had made no mistake at all while refining the ingredients, and the mixing of energy was even better this time around, thanks to her Dao.

Once she was done refining all of the ingredients, the final remaining energy was as perfect as it ever could be. This was the type of pill she had always wished she could be able to make. And this time, she believed she could.

But, there was still one issue.

‘My technique is not the best,’ Momo thought.

Alex had told her time and again that while the technique she used was great, it was far from the greatest. The best technique for making pills was something he had. It was something he had said he would give her later on, and that time had not come yet.

So, Momo was still stuck with the lesser technique. If she were to use the technique, there was only so much chance that she could get what she wanted right now.

And she only had one shot at this, so she wasn’t willing to take chances. At least, not yet.

‘I need to improve my chances,’ Momo thought. Whatever she needed to do, she had to do it quickly. Otherwise, the powder at the bottom of the cauldron would deteriorate—something she still didn’t quite understand as there was no more heat for the powder to burn—and she would lose all of her chance.

‘I can use my Dao to give me a push for the final few percentages,’ Momo thought, but even so, that wasn’t a guarantee. Her chances improved, but there was one other way to improve it even more.

Her master had told her about it without intending to teach her about it until a while later. He had mentioned to her what it was while saying that she would only learn it when she reached the Immortal realm, since that was when he had learned it as well.

Momo put the powder to work as she spun it all together with her technique, forming it into a tight, compact sphere where all of the different combinations and structures were properly put together.

Normally, this would be where she put the energy into the empty pill, but she needed to improve her chances. So, she did what her master had off-handedly told her would improve her chances at gaining a higher percentage.

Momo compressed the pill.

Pills had a natural leniency on how large they could be while still being a pill. As such, she could compress the current pill by just a little bit to make it smaller.

Doing so wouldn’t make the pill worse in any way, but it would mean that the equilibrium between powder and energy was broken. Due to its smaller size, the pill could do more with less.

Which meant her comparatively larger energy would have an easier chance of finding a place in the pill, as there was more of it.

In her own master’s words, in a normal situation, a restaurant would have exactly the number of seats necessary for all who would visit it.

But Momo had changed that. The seats were now fewer, and as a result, there were more customers than seats, which meant the chances of any seats remaining empty by the end were much, much lower.

And she spared no effort there either.

Using everything she had, including her Dao, Momo pushed the energy into the pill, letting it fill it up. The pill devoured the energy like dry soil did water.

And by the end of it, it could accept no more at all.

Once Momo understood she couldn’t do anything else, she stopped as the pill was formed. However, if she had done it right, then the job was far from over.

She turned her head up, looking toward the sky as dark clouds began gathering overhead.