Eternal Cultivation Of Alchemy

Most beasts in the desert grew stronger at a very slow rate. Most humans took years to grow strong enough to fight against these beasts as well.

So Whisker understood that he could not expect a very quick improvement to his strength. And yet, he was still somehow disappointed by how slow his speed had become.

In the past 2 days, he had grown by 2 realms at most, with his body cultivation now being somewhere around Immortal Ascendant 4th realm. At the rate he was growing stronger, it would take 2 more days to reach the 5th realm.

Then maybe a week to reach the 6th realm, and so on.

Reaching the Immortal Transcendent 1st realm, which a regular jar full of Elixir helped one reach, would take Whisker years to do so.

‘I don’t have that sort of time,’ he thought. He understood he was being selfish, but he had no other choice. He couldn’t spend years just cultivating in the sludge down below.

The slow improvement rate was an issue that Whisker wanted to circumvent somehow.

What did he need exactly? A better cultivation technique? A larger size to collect more Elixir from the surrounding? Or was it based on the race of the beast as well?

Over the next 2 days, Whisker made as many interesting changes as he could to his own body and how he was approaching the absorption of Elixir. He made as many positive changes as he thought he could.

And while it had shown some positive results, it only did so for a single day before the rate of improvement shot back down to nothing at all.

It didn’t take much after that for Whisker to realize that simply cultivating with the sludge around him wouldn’t help at all.

Perhaps it was the body’s incapability to suck in the Elixir from the sludge or simply the lack of much Elixir in the sludge in the first place that things were so slow.

Guessing as much, Whisker decided that he needed to change his approach. Cultivating while surrounded by sludge wouldn’t work. The sludge itself was likely a bigger problem than what Whisker was considering it to be.

In that case, he had to do something else. Just like his brother, he had to directly consume the Elixir as well.

‘Do I eat the sludge then?’ Whisker thought. Just the thought of eating all of that dirt and grime made Whisker give up on the idea. Not only was it a disgusting idea, it was also quite bad.

Why should he eat all that sludge when the sludge itself wasn’t the Elixir? The Elixir was simply inside the sludge.

‘Can I extract the Elixir from the sludge?’ Whisker thought. ‘I need to refine it somehow.’

After thinking about it for a while, Whisker realized that he needed to do some experiments to learn as much about the Elixir as he could.

He thought of several ways to extract the Elixir depending on how it interacted with various things he planned on doing to the sludge.

The next time Whisker had the chance, he went down to the depths of the underground and collected several cauldrons full of sludge. He wondered for brief moments if taking away so much sludge would somehow ruin the integrity of the land underground, but he quickly threw away such thoughts.

If so many beasts entering and escaping didn’t make any changes, then taking away the sludge wouldn’t make any changes either. It would only be an issue in the sense that if he took away the sludge, the Elixir down there might lower in amount.

But then, the many beasts were already absorbing so much of it every day that at this point Whisker would be stupid not to realize that Elixir was in fact constantly replenished down there.

Once Whisker collected what he wanted, he didn’t stay there. He used his Earth Movement technique and swam back out to the surface where the sun was only just beginning to climb up into the sky.

It had been over a week since he had seen the day here in the desert.

Whisker nearly came across a strong beast with Sunheart while making his way out, but he quickly dodged it and swam through the desert to another location. Once he came out, he quickly made his way to the rocky region that he had made a temporary home for himself.

Upon arriving there, Whisker took out a single cauldron of the sludge and scooped out a portion of it which he placed on the ground and began heating it up.

Using his Qi to create fire, he slowly heated up the sludge until most of its water content evaporated away. What remained was a thick clay-like dark slab of dirt that flaked away when tried to pull.

This was Whisker’s first experiment for the Elixir, which was to check whether it would evaporate or not. Depending on the answer, the way to extract Elixir would be far different.

He had smelled the fumes that came out of the heated-up sludge, and it did not carry the familiar smell of Elixir that Whisker had gotten used to by now.

He reached down to the flaky bits of hardened sludge and ate a bit of it. He immediately spit it out, but not before gaining a subtle taste of what he was looking for.

The taste of Elixir.

‘Elixir doesn’t evaporate,’ Whisker thought. That was incredibly useful to know.

Now, the other thing he needed to know was whether it was water-soluble or not. He believed it was, but he still needed to test it.

Testing that was as easy as mixing water into the sludge several times and emptying it into another large container. Once the sludge was washed multiple times, if it still carried a lot of Elixir, then it wasn’t water-soluble.

If the Elixir was now instead transferred over to the large water, it was soluble.

After another series of experiments, it was clear that the Elixir was water-solute, in which case Whisker simply had to evaporate away the water, so that all that would remain was pure Elixir.