Eternal Cultivation Of Alchemy

As heavenly beasts, the Azure Dragons were accustomed to witnessing sights that would surprise the regular masses. They had alchemists of their own. While they were not as good as the phoenixes, they were plenty great on their own.

There were quite a few alchemists capable of making pills with pill veins, that too quite consistently.

Or so they had thought.

They only now realized that they hadn’t the faintest clue what consistently meant.

The group of dragons were surprised when Alex created a pill with pill clouds appearing right away. Once he stopped a few pill lightnings, he pulled out the 9-veined pill.

The 9 veins didn’t surprise them as much as the fact that there had been a pill cloud in the first place. Doing it right away on the first pill was quite lucky.

And then Alex did it a second time.

That made the dragons wonder if it wasn’t luck.

Then Alex did it again. And again. And again.

By then, the dragons quickly understood what was happening. Nothing but shock filled their faces as Alex made the 6th and final pill of the day, that too forming pill clouds.

Once all 6 pills were done, Alex placed them all in their various bottles and looked toward the 6 dragons they belonged to.

“Alright, pay up,” he said.

The dragons took a moment to regain their composure and approached Alex a second later. Alex brought out a large cauldron for each of them and had them fill it up to the brim.

Transforming to their regular beast forms, the dragons’ bodies grew to a massive size, making their blood increase in amount as well. It made it easy for them to give away a lot of blood.

Alex checked their blood for potency and nodded absentmindedly before handing them their pills.

“It’s done,” he said, looking over to the other group who couldn’t give their blood yet. “I’ll make the remaining pills when the rest of your blood is saturated enough for me to accept.”

The dragons nodded, shock refusing to leave their faces.

Alex looked at the surroundings and noticed a few beasts in the distance that had gathered after his miraculous display, but they seemed too scared to approach. That was for the better.

“Now, go cultivate,” Alex said. “I’ll need to be alone.”

The dragons wasted no time and left right away, each one unable to wait for their next turn. They had so many pills they wanted him to make.

Alex sat down far away, pulled out some beasts’ blood again, and began practicing.

Time passed as he attempted to isolate more and more bloodline elements he could find in those bloods. He chose one thing to isolate and began training on how to do it.

It turned out that things were more difficult than he could imagine. Separating something so incredibly tiny and completely fused with the blood was far more difficult than he gave it credit for. It required an incredible amount of focus and knowledge to be able to separate anything.

And even then, he couldn’t separate everything, which was the main issue he was facing.

He had two trains of thought regarding how he could isolate just one element from the blood.

One train of thought told him that he had to take out just the element, leaving the blood behind. That required him to focus entirely on that element and would make him use a lot of Intent.

The second train of thought led him to consider an option where he took everything away instead. This required less finesse than the first idea since he could take away things one at a time, without having to focus on anything in particular.

Even if he made a mistake, he could just replace it back into the blood and start over. The first way didn’t allow that.

It was fortunate that Alex had a lot of blood to work with and could absolutely try out both methods and figure out what worked and

what didn’t.

He tried both ways and failed many times doing so. Any minor mistake ruined the whole batch of blood sometimes, and he just had to start over with a fresh batch.

Sometimes, things would go smoothly until the end where the thing

that was supposed to be pure would be contaminated, causing him to

start over again.

The more he tried, the more he failed. But he also came closer and closer to understanding the nature of these things that he dubbed the “bloodline elements.”

One of its most important properties revealed itself when, after several days, Alex successfully completed the first way. He managed to extract just the parts he had come to understand as the bloodline elements-tiny red particles within the blood that weren’t exactly blood. When he did, he got vibrant specks of those particles in the palm of his hand.

Alex smiled for a moment, feeling relieved as he did something great. And then, it all turned black.

The bloodline element was dead.

Alex couldn’t tell what mistake he had made, so he tried again. He

brought out another batch, did the same thing as before, and made sure not to disrupt it, and… it died again.

Alex did it again and again, doing something different each time, but each time the vibrant red particles turned black. It was then he understood that he was doing nothing wrong.

Those particles just died when outside of blood. Reintegrating them into the blood didn’t revive them either.

He came to the decision that the first method wouldn’t work. He had

to go to the second one.

He took some time to make pills for the beasts, check up on Pearl, and then move to a new location before starting to work on the blood

again.

After going through the first method, the second method was much

easier to handle. He took out parts of the blood, bit by bit, until he was left with what he wanted.

And it turned out that this method too had a major flaw that he was going to have to rectify.