Eternal Cultivation Of Alchemy

“Have you come to your senses, young man?”

The chief’s voice came from behind Alex while he was roaming his incorporeal prison, training his Intent. He turned around.

“I’ve never been away from them,” Alex said as he turned around. “Are you any closer to believing my truth?”

The chief raised an eyebrow. “You still wish to keep on this facade? Maybe I should come later then.”

He turned around, ready to leave.

“Alright, wait!” Alex said, releasing a sigh afterward.

The chief turned back around. “Are you ready to give us some elixir now?” he asked.

“Would you indulge me for a bit?” he asked. “Just for a short moment.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just for a moment, imagine I am not lying to you. Everything I have said to you is the truth. Can you do that?”

The chief was puzzled at the request but he shrugged. “Sure. You’re a virtuous young man, who wanted to save a woman from death, despite the fact that she was clearly alright.”

“She wasn’t alright. You should know better. The crab might not have been agile enough to defeat her easily, but its shell was far too tough for her to break through. In such a matchup, sooner or later, your daughter would’ve either become too tired to fight or made a mistake that the crab could take advantage of.”

“And it would need but that one chance,” Alex said. “She was fighting a losing battle, and we both know it. To say she could win is to delude yourself.”

The chief’s face was stone-cold, like a man holding back anger.

“But…” Alex continued. “That’s not the point. Since you have now assumed that I am telling the truth, that I am someone who is not aware of anything, I wish for you to tell me something. What the hell is this elixir?”

Alex’s question caught the chief off guard. He had expected the conversation to go in an entirely different direction, where Alex would try to prove his innocence, based on the assumptions. Instead, he was asked a question that Alex should have the answer to already.

“Please, answer me.”

The chief frowned, starting to fear that he might have gotten things wrong. Maybe the person he had caught wasn’t someone from the inner circle of the desert.

‘That can’t be,’ he thought. ‘Where else would he have become an Immortal from?’

Not only was Alex quite strong with his Qi, the fact that they had needed over 50 people to tie him down with a formation and still had failed to knock him out had been a clear proof of that.

‘He must be an Immortal. No, I can’t falter. He’s trying to make me doubt my own belief.’

The chief was sure he had caught onto Alex’s strategy.

“You want an explanation, sure. Elixir is what they call the liquid that people in the inner region of the desert have managed to create. They somehow extract it from sources such as beasts and plants, the method of which is completely unknown to us.”

‘Extract from beasts?’ he thought. That was different from pastes.

“What does it do?” he asked. “Does it give you Qi? Is it what they’re using to become Immortal?”

“What? No,” the chief said, his manner of speech exaggerated because of how incredibly far off Alex’s ‘guesses’ were. “It helps your body to grow physically stronger.”

“…What?” Alex was caught off guard by the answer. “It helps with body cultivation?”

“A single spoonful of elixir is considered to be equivalent to consuming an entire beast found in the desert. They are incredibly potent at quickly improving a person’s physical strength,” the chief said, his eyes narrowing by the moment.

Alex’s shock was clear on his face, and the chief didn’t believe it.

“Get that fake shock off your face. Your act won’t work on me,” he said. “Now then, since you know that I do know what an elixir is, you won’t be able to fake your way out of here. You can only leave when you give me a jar full of that elixir.”

Alex put his thoughts aside for now and replied to the chief, “and again, I’m telling you, you have the wrong person. I am not from deeper in the desert, nor do I carry this thing called elixir.”

The chief scoffed. “Are you going to deny being an Immortal too now?”

“No, I am an Immortal. You were correct in that assumption.”

The chief raised his eyebrow. “And yet you claim to not be an Insider?”

“I am not.”

“Then how did you become an Immortal?”

It took Alex all of half a second to decide to answer truthfully. “I am an Immortal from another world. I was sent here as a punishment — not unlike what is happening to me right now — punished for a crime that I didn’t do.”

“Another world?” the chief asked with clear disdain. “You want me to believe that? You might as well call yourself Death at this rate. You carry her skin at least.”

“It’s fine. I didn’t expect you to trust me,” Alex said with a sigh. “You can leave now, chief. You can’t get anything out of me even if you tried to. My Soul Space is inaccessible by myself, so I can’t even give you anything.”

The man narrowed his eyes.

“Since you seem to not seem to understand, I will explain something here,” he said. “I believe you to be someone from the inner desert, which is why I have kept you alive right now. Your only way of escaping here is by giving me a jar full of the elixir that you claim to not know about.”

Alex kept listening.

“If somehow you are telling the truth, then that means you are nothing more than a saboteur who ruined my daughter’s Extolite ceremony. In which case, the only punishment is death.”

“So, you only have two options here,” the chief emphasized. “You either give me what I ask, or you will forever be imprisoned until the day you die.”