Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

Alex opened his eyes back in his cottage. He looked up at the ceiling, but as expected, the lantern was still out.

"I should find other sources of fire. Maybe I should just go buy some matches or whatever equivalent this game has for making fires."

He stood up and walked outside. He saw the same scene as yesterday. Dozens of disciples going on about their daily lives.

He didn't need to open his map this time, he knew how to get to the sect valley. After a few minutes of walking, he reached the sect valley.

He still wasn't used to seeing hundreds of disciples running about in what was basically a small-sized city. He had two things to do here today.

The first thing he needed to do was sell all those monsters he killed in the forest the other day. According to the female senior, he met yesterday, he had to sell the items in the sect market.

He opened the map to check where it was. He quickly located it next to the Disciple Hall on the map, so he walked towards there.

In just a few minutes, he was in front of the sect market. Looking at what was in front of him truly surprised him, as it was nowhere close to what he had been expecting.

He had been expecting a massive building just like all the other buildings he had been to. Except, the sect market was nothing like it.

In front of him was a long road that was at least 200 m long. And all over the side of the roads were disciples laying objects in front of them, trying to sell them.

There were 3 or 4 properly set stalls that Alex could tell were set up by the sect itself as the owner of those stalls had silver linings in their green robes. They were run by sect elders.

He walked up to one of the stalls. There were a few disciples in front of him waiting for their turn to buy or sell their stuff. Eventually, his turn arrived.

"Are you here to buy or sell?" the elder in the stall asked. The elder seemed quite old, at least in his late 40s. There were signs of wrinkles on his face, and his beard and hair had a lot of white streaks on them.

"I am here to sell, Elder," Alex replied respectfully.

"All right, give me what you have." The elder said as he prepared the table in front of him for the items.

"Umm, Elder, I am here to sell monster corpses, so this table won't be enough," Alex said seeing the little space on top of the table.

"Oh." The elder said as his eyes perked up a bit. He brought out a small storage bag and handed it to Alex. " Alright then, put them here."

Alex took the storage bag and opened his inventory. Aside from the alchemy materials, there were exactly 33 items related to his hunt in the eastern forest. 14 of those were corpses. 13 Skin tempering realm corpses and 1 Muscle Tempering realm corpses.

There were 11 monster cores, including the earth snake monster core. The other 11 items were the random materials that were dropped from the dead monsters.

He didn't know if the other materials were alchemy materials or not, so he decided to just sell them. The monster cores as well would give him too low Qi if he ate it like a pill, so he decided to sell it too.

He wanted to eat the earth snake's core, but the snake was only at Muscle Tempering 3rd Realms so he didn't bother to. Even if he got 2 realms worth of Qi, that was just a night of sleep for him.

All in all, he sold all 33 items. He put them all in the storage bag and returned them to the elder.

The elder took the bag and looked at it. Within seconds, his eyes went wide. Most of the disciples that came to sell monster corpses only had 2 or 3 at most.

Since the sect was alchemy-focused, the disciples usually didn't bother killing monsters and just bought the materials instead. However, this disciple had just brought back 12 corpses and was also selling their cores and materials.

"Are you sure you want to sell it all?" the elder asked. Most disciples tended to keep the cores and materials as they were important alchemy materials. The elder was surprised to see a disciple that was selling it all.

"Yes," Alex said without hesitation. He had no idea about the usefulness of the cores and materials, as he still believed alchemy only needed plants and herbs.

The elder looked at the items he had on him and started calculating. He spoke in a low voice, "Let's see. 13 points for 13 corpses, 5 points for 1 corpse, 20 points for the cores, 10 points for the other core, 20 points for the material, and 10 points for the venom."

"So, a total of… 78 points" the elder stopped mumbling.

"Give me your nameplate," he asked Alex.

Alex was ready with the nameplate, so he handed it to him. Unlike the other elders and disciples, he didn't bring the nameplate to his forehead, and instead just kept it in his hand.

"Alright, here you go. You have been credited 78 contribution points. Good job young man." The elder congratulated him and handed his nameplate back.

'Huh! 78 points? How?' he was dumbfounded. He looked at his nameplate, and he indeed had 88 total points now. 'Damn, so I can just sell monster corpses here, and I can get enough points to survive for the week, huh' he thought to himself.

He took his nameplate and left the stall. He was about to leave the sect market altogether when he noticed something at one of the street vendors.

Something had caught his eyes. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say, something had caught his … feelings?