Eternal Cultivation Of Alchemy

When Alex came up with the fourth recipe, over a day had already passed. Unlike the first three pills, this pill was not as simple.

Using the Carnelian Assault Boar’s Tusk as the major ingredient, he created a pill where a person could use up their Blood aura to turn it into Fire aura to add to any fire techniques they may have.

No matter the type of technique, as long as it used the Fire spiritual root to extract its Qi from, that Qi would be greatly enhanced using the person’s Blood aura.

A pill that allowed the conversion of one aura to another was certainly quite great, so Alex wondered if the opposite was possible too. He spent a few hours going through the recipe front and back, seeing how he could reverse the effect.

Reversing the effect would make the next recipe a unique one as well, so he was more than excited about it. However, no matter how he looked at it, he simply couldn’t make the type of pill he wanted.

With just the 20 ingredients he had to work with, making a pill that allowed one to convert Fire aura into Blood aura was simply not possible, sadly. So, after some wasted time, Alex moved on to refining the previous recipe.

The refinement process took half an hour at best.

Alex could so easily see through the dozens and dozens of possible structures of all ingredients involved in the recipe and understood what worked together and what didn’t without even trying it himself.

Going through the myriad different ways the ingredients could be formed, he settled on one where it all perfectly fit together. Once he figured that much out, he began preparing the recipe.

He wrote down the full recipe in a quick few minutes and put it aside. The time was not yet right to make a pill. He would wait for that.

Alex looked at the timer in the sky and saw that nearly a day and a half had passed by now. The fourth recipe had taken him longer than the first three combined.

The issue, of course, was simple. The first three recipes were easy ones that he could have figured out in no time at all. The rest would need more work. He had also wasted a few hours trying to reverse the pill, so there was that too.

After looking at the time, Alex looked at the ranking of names below. Several dozen names were already there at this point.

Aethersage had finally ranked there too, up in the 40s. Alex found it surprising that it would take the man so long to come up with the recipes. But thinking about it, it made sense that it would take him so long.

After all, Aethersage was quite new to Alchemy itself. While he had spent his time learning how to make pills and how to replace ingredients, he most likely hadn’t had much training in making something entirely new.

That sort of thing took a lot of practice, which was time Aethersage had to spread through his other practices too.

Still, having a name in the 40s wasn’t bad at all. There were many who had been practicing Alchemy far longer than him that had yet to complete their task.

Alex ignored it all once again and began focusing his time on making the next recipe.

The fifth recipe was quite difficult to fathom. The more recipes he made for himself, the fewer options he had to continue.

He could no longer make a physical healing pill that involved Eight Twilight Silk Seeds.

He could no longer make a mental healing pill that involved Golden Mind Chrysanthemum.

He could no longer make a defensive pill that involved Nine Star Jewel Fruit.

And now, he could no longer make a conversion pill that had anything to do with Blood aura improving one’s Fire aura involving the Carnelian Assault Boar’s Tusk.

The more he made, the fewer options he had.

At this point, Alex decided to change strategy.

Instead of trying to let his mind wander into a recipe, he decided to actively search for one.

Since the recipes had to involve one of the major ingredients, he could use those as the seed to grow a new recipe from it.

Alex looked through the list and saw that he hadn’t made any use of the Immortal Jadehorn Leaves. So, for the next recipe, he decided to make use of it.

He went through the ingredient’s attributes first. It was an ingredient with a strong Wood aura. It had a soothing effect on one’s Qi, which was why it was a main ingredient in pills to quell a person’s Qi deviation.

Aside from that, there were minor properties in the leaves, such as helping improve one’s Wind aura, slightly making one resistant to lightning damage, or helping them attune closer with Sound aura. None of these properties, however, were strong enough for the leaves to be exclusively used for that.

So, the obvious answer was a soothing pill that helped calm one’s raging Qi.

He wanted to think through it all from the start, but upon second thought, he realized it would be far quicker for him to just make the recipe that the leaves were normally used in.

All he would have to do was replace the ingredients in them. So long as he could find the right ingredients, it would take no time at all.

‘Did they use this method too?’ Alex wondered. It seemed like an easy method to do things, so he wondered if Faithseeker and Palesilver used that very method.

Alex tried his hand at that method, so he began finding replacements for the ingredients in the original recipe. He found a couple of replacements that he could easily make, but the rest were difficult.

He tried his hardest to think about how he could make the rest of the ingredients work, but he simply couldn’t. There was simply no way to create all those ingredients with just the 20 he had at hand.

After more than an hour of thinking, Alex gave up. If the others had used this technique, then they had gotten lucky with it.

Instead of doing that, Alex began going through it all on his own.

Alex took a lot of time trying to make the Qi-quelling property of the Immortal Jadehorn Leaves work. However, no matter how he looked at it, it was simply not possible with the few ingredients he had. So, he would instead have to make some other pill with it.

Alex had ignored the other properties until now, so he decided to go through them and see if any worked.

There wasn’t much he could do to improve the Wind aspect of the ingredient. As for the thunder aspect, he found a few things that could work, but the pill he would make from it would be quite mediocre, so he chose not to make it.

Finally, Alex landed on the sound aspect of the leaves. At first, it too looked like a dead end. However, he quickly noticed how well the sound aspect reacted with the Immortal Mistwillow Bark and the Skywing Moth Dust.

There was something here, he was certain of it. He would just have to find it now.