Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

"Just collect what you know, I will tell you what you missed," Alex said. That was the only way he could think of teaching Whisker at all.

There were simply too many plants here to sit down and start explaining it all one by one. All he could do was give a name and explain about it once they had left the secret realm.

While Whisker collected the ingredients, Alex looked around at the secret realm. He had learned it was large before, but he wasn't aware of just how large it was. He was using his spiritual sense and he couldn't even see the poison plants that were supposed to be beyond the mountain.

Hell, even the mountain was barely in his range, which was beyond the hill he was walking on.

'So big,' he thought. He always knew that the secret realms were large, but the space inside was rarely ever a thing for concern.

However, since this was a space filled with nothing but rare plants, all of which could be an ingredient for some sort of pill.

Alex stopped for a second and looked to his left to find a plant that was a moderately rare ingredient in a healing pill. Since it wasn't that hard to find, Alex didn't have to worry about making it extinct.

The ingredient of the plant that was useful was the roots. The plant outside of the ground itself wasn't that useful at all.

So, with a simple chop of his hand, he cut the plant from the stem. Then, he pushed his straightened hand into the earth and pulled out the clump of roots and dirt that were entangled together.

It would take some time if he were to sit and clean it, so Alex just placed it all into his storage bag without any care. He would rather gather more right now than waste time trying to store it perfectly.

In any case, it wasn't like the loss of energy in the plants was going to affect his pills in any way.

He continued walking through the pathway, gathering only the Saint-ranked ingredients. Whisker was gathering everything he could find as in a way this was a test to see how he could do.

Alex told him the names of various plants that he wasn't aware of before. It took him nearly 15 minutes before he was up the hill. When he finally reached it, he couldn't help but be awed by what he was seeing.

Beyond the hill was a wide array of ecosystems. There was another patch of plants just like the ones he had crossed before. At the feet of the hill was a flowing river, and beyond the river was a forest that was full of flowers and fruits.

Beyond that, Alex could see a giant mountain that was one of many that staggered around the secret realm. Some of those mountains even had some ice on the top.

Alex turned around and looked at where he had come from. He had asked about the poison area and had been pointed in this direction. So, he hadn't given much thought to the other directions.

However, now that he was looking at it, the secret realm went as far on the other side as it did on this side.

And each and every single patch of land he could see was filled with trees or flowers.

Alex turned around and walked down the hill. His first course of action was obviously to find the Corrosive Willow tree. Once he had found that, he could take his time going anywhere.

He was only making it down the hill for half a minute before his eyes fell on something. "Woah!" he shouted in surprise. "Spirit Cleansing Lily!"

He had been told that there was Spirit Cleansing Lily available in this city before buying Harry, but for some reason, he hadn't been expecting to find it.

He looked around him more carefully and he found dozens of these flowers that were simply there, waiting to be plucked.

Whisker walked up to the flower and looked around. "How do I pick this flower?" he asked. He remembered using these flowers 2 times after his intelligence had increased by a certain amount.

"I don't know," Alex said. He could exactly which flower he was supposed to pick, but he could not help Whisker pick it by himself as Alex didn't know how he did it.

Alex had always just done it based on a feeling. Was there even a real way?

'Is there any information in my head?' Alex wondered. He had never actually checked for the Spirit Cleansing Lily once the knowledge base in his head was unlocked for him after entering the Saint realm.

"Let's see…" he read through the information before landing up on the answer that he so desperately wanted.

"Oh, you use your spiritual sense?" Alex couldn't help but be surprised. He was taken aback by the revelation of how one could pick Spirit Cleansing Lily.

"Spiritual sense?" Whisker asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Apparently you scan the flowers with your spiritual sense as deep as you can. On one of the flowers, you will notice an abnormality because of the existence of an energy that the others don't. If you're good enough, you will notice it and be able to find out exactly what you need to pick."

"Oh," Whisker said and started looking through the flowers. At the same time, Alex tried to understand how he was doing it back when he didn't have spiritual sense the first time he had gathered these.

'No, I'm looking at it wrongly,' Alex thought. 'The important part here isn't that you can sense the energy with your spiritual sense, but rather there is energy in there. It's likely that the Intent hidden in me was searching for that.'

Energy… Alex wondered if that worked as well.

Suddenly, his purple pupils widened as the focus in his eyes changed. At the same time, his vision was filled with a multitude of colors that became hard to distinguish immediately.

There were just too many plants around him and their energy were mixed together quite well. Alex got closer to the flower and ignored everything but the flowers.

After a bit of luck, he could see the flowers without much obstruction from the other energies in which case he saw what he had wanted.

Most of the flowers had a very dim and vague white color to them. It was the color of energy that had no elements in it. However, one of the flowers had a very bright white color that threatened to outshine every other flower in the group.

"Is this the flower?" Whisker asked, pointing at the one Alex was looking at right now.

Alex smiled. "Yep, that's the one," he said.

Whisker got happy and noted down the flower before taking it for himself. The rest of the flowers on the flower bed did not wilt immediately. That meant that Alex and Whisker had gotten it correct and were thus able to pick the Spirit Cleansing Lily without anyone else's help.

"Do you want to keep it?" Alex asked Whisker who was putting the flower into the storage bag that was tied to his chest.

Whisker nodded and put it in.

"Do you know who you will give it to?" Alex asked.

"To brother's father," Whisker said. "After we find him."

Alex unintentionally let out a wide smile. "Thank you, Whisker."

They then went around the hill trying to find other Spirit Cleansing Lilies. It would be best to have 3 or more of them at all times.

After half an hour of collecting what they could, Alex and Whisker got down from the hill and flew across the river, arriving in front of the forest.

There were flowers and fruits that covered the trees in the forest, so both he and Whisker got to collecting everything they could.

He slowly made his way toward the mountain on the other side, but in the process, he stripped the trees clean of anything worth stripping.

He found fruits, leaves, bark, sap, seeds, wood, root, and other various things that could help him with his alchemy.

Whisker ran about the trees, collecting as many things as he could as well, while Alex explained to him when he didn't recognize something.

Butterflies flew with the wind while bees buzzed all around him. He could see beehives all over the place and knew that some of this honey was definitely going to be useful.

He found some easy-to-harvest honey that was made by the bees directly on the inside of a tree. The ones that hung by the tree were not something he could harvest as they would include him having to destroy them due to his lack of idea on how to harvest them exactly.

At least they still had a place to go back to in the trees even if he did take away most of the honey.

Alex spent so much time in the forest gathering the various stuff that it was dark by the time he was ready to go out of it.

The sun had set below the mountains so he was walking in shadows right now. He walked up the mountain that was also full of trees, but not as much as the forest below it.

He took what he could from there and arrived at the peak of the mountain a while later. Then, he looked down from it and saw an expanse of flatlands.

And just as he had been told, the Poisonous plants were in the flatlands, below the mountain.