Eternal Cultivation Of Alchemy

Upon letting the cauldron leave beyond his sphere of influence, the water quickly bubbled away as everything within the cauldron vanished, turning back into Qi through the Intent in the surrounding.

It happened so quickly that Alex didn’t even get to see how it had happened. He merely sensed a bunch of Water aura in the air, that too was quickly broken down into simple energy.

Hell had so easily destroyed all usage of Qi.

“Woah!” Whisker said, surprised by how easy that had been. The same task that had taken him nearly the entire hour had taken Alex merely 5 minutes. And even then, the most he had to do there was wait around for the dirt to sink to the bottom.

Whisker knew he couldn’t possibly have done it as fast as Alex had, but he would have still been able to do it in about 10 to 15 minutes. He really was quite stupid to not have thought of it in the moment.

Alex walked over to the cauldron and looked inside, and so did Whisker.

“Huh?” Alex looked inside first. “There’s nothing there. Did we fail?”

Whisker sniffed the air. “No, it’s there, brother,” he said, checking to see where it was. “Look, the surface of the cauldron. It’s coating everything.”

Alex used his spiritual sense and saw a thin layer of coat around the cauldron. It was so impossibly thin that had Whisker not smelled it for him, he would have assumed it to have failed.

“How do I even bring it out?” he asked. The cauldron looked like it had been wiped just once with a layer of oil, and now his task was to remove just the oil that had been applied inside.

It was a difficult task if Elixir was anything like oil, but since it was not, Alex could simply pour a bit of water inside and collect everything. When he was done, he had maybe half a pill bottle’s worth of liquid, and even that was quite diluted compared to what Whisker had given him.

“How is yours so thick compared to what I made?” Alex asked.

“I made a bunch of these to start with and then boil them all together at the end when I have more to work with,” Whisker said. “You should leave it be, brother. Just a small pile of sludge won’t give you much Elixir at all. It’s not worth taking it out right now.”

“Okay,” Alex said and let it be. He did as Whisker explained and washed the remaining sludge with water and brought out whatever Elixir that had been left behind. Once that evaporated away, he barely had any more Elixir than what he started with.

“I see,” Alex said. “This is going to take some time for sure.”

“But it’s going to be worth it, isn’t it?” Whisker asked.

Alex nodded. “I can’t imagine any other task that I would want to be doing right now,” he said.

There was one thing he had to do, but he needed to let his mind rest for that. So, for now, this was all he could and would do.

As Alex streamlined the process of forming Elixir, Whisker stayed to the side and recounted more of what he had discovered.

Alex was quite excited to learn about the actions of the beasts and why they always disappeared at morning or night, and only came out during specific time periods.

“So the beasts without Sunhearts go down when it’s hot outside in order to absorb Elixir, and the beasts with Sunhearts go inside during the night when Yin is drawn underground. Is that it?” Alex asked.

Whisker nodded. “They do so every day.”

“And you are absolutely sure these beasts can reverse their Sunhearts?” Alex asked.

“Yes, brother. I’ve been taking advantage of that for the past 2 and a half years. It is thanks to this very thing that I’ve been able to gather these better Elixirs.”

Alex nodded. It did make sense. And he trusted Whisker to know what he was talking about.

“Although,” Whisker continued, “I still can’t tell why they don’t stay underground for a long time. They would absorb more Elixir that way.”

Alex shrugged. “Maybe they want to continue to grow their Sunhearts. Didn’t you say the deeper they go, the stronger they get?” he asked.

“Yes, but they don’t go deeper at all,” Whisker said. “I stayed with one for more than a year. In the entire time, it kept going up and down every day, but it never exceeded the depth. So its Sunheart couldn’t have continued to grow.”

Alex thought for a moment. “Well, you can’t really judge an unintelligent beast for acting on instinct,” he said. “It may not know what it’s doing, and is just doing it because it thinks it needs to.”

That was also the conclusion Whisker had come to, but there had to be something more to it than just that.

“Oh right,” Whisker remembered. “These beasts also travel in the same direction for some reason.”

“Same direction?” Alex asked as he created more water for the sludge.

Whisker explained what he had observed. How the beasts slowly moved in a certain direction, going about a kilometer every month. They were unbelievably slow, but they did move.

“Are you sure they’re all moving in the same direction?” Alex asked. “It’s not just a thing one of the beasts does.”

Whisker nodded. “I tested the theory with multiple beasts in the desert. They all move toward the same direction.”

“What direction is that?” Alex asked.

“I… don’t know,” Whisker said. “I’d have to go to the desert to show you.”

He turned around for a moment. “Maybe it’s this direction?” He pointed toward a certain direction.

Alex thought what lay in that direction. “I think that’s where Northsword flows to,” he said, thinking of the river. “Are they all going toward the river?”

Whisker’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe? I can’t tell.”

Alex thought for a moment. “We’ll be collecting so much more sludge in the next few years. We’ll figure out the answer sooner or later.”