Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

Alex opened his eyes back in the foggy area. He sat up and immediately all the information he never had in the real world was there for him to use.

'This is really weird,' he thought. He was starting to question the things that he had been ignoring as part of the game.

"Wait, maybe I am getting ahead of myself. What if the developers just learned how to access memories of mine. That sounds a lot more plausible than there existing another world that I was being sent to," Alex thought.

Despite firmly believing in his idea about this being a real world, he wanted to make sure there weren't any other pieces of information that he had been unknowingly ignoring.

"That chip… could it be what looked into my memories?" he wondered. That didn't sound wrong to him. Maybe the developers of the helmet and the capsule were just that bright that they managed to do what no one else had been able to replicate since.

"It did have formation-like patterns. Maybe there is a formation out there that can look into memo— Wait, no. What am I thinking? If it only looked into my memories, then formations as a thing should not exist out of the game."

"So, there should have been some other methods in which they are accessing my memories," Alex thought.

"Let's forget about them accessing my memories; how am I accessing my memories from the game? How come I only remember these when I play the game?" he thought.

"Nothing makes sense if I compare these things to what I have been told about Virtual Reality as a concept… that is if I believe this to just be virtual reality or a game.

If I were to think of this as a real-world… then the formation in my world must be sending me to this body and I am accessing the memories of this body," Alex thought.

Clones were a thing he didn't know much about, but he had seen cases of it. Song Zun's body was being used by someone else. Maybe, that was the same with him.

"I did log in to the game for the first time inside a forest. Was there a corpse in there just ready for me to steal?" he wondered. "Aside from that, what about the talents of the body? Were they the talents of the owner of this body and I just got lucky?" Alex thought.

Alex sent his spiritual sense all over his body, but there was not a single sign that he was a walking corpse.

"Wait no, that wouldn't make sense. I… I made this body. While I used random preferences, there should be others whose body matches how they look like in real life. There is no way they were a corpse before that… right?"

"Or maybe I am just that unknown about clones and there are other ways to change them as a corpse," Alex thought. He was getting contradicting answers from himself.

One thought he had would pretty much prove to him that this all was real, and then in the next moment he would have thoughts that told him that there was a much simpler explanation for all these that didn't include this all being real.

"Urghh… I might get a headache at this rate. Sigh, let's stop thinking about those things for now. Let me see what formations there are that matches the design in the chip," Alex thought.

He then sat down and started looking through all the blueprints to understand the design and what the designs were meant for. He not only wanted to find similar-looking formations but also check what it was that the formation did.

Unfortunately, of the formation blueprints he had, not a single one of them looked anything like the pattern from the chip. He really tried to find similarities that might have been hidden in the formations, but not one of them matched at all.

"Well, that was a failure. Am I really wrong?" he wondered. Alex was starting to doubt himself when he thought of something. "Haha, that should help me put a nail in the coffin."

Alex stood up and shouted, "Cultivation Method."

Suddenly, a blue panel appeared in front of him. It had been ages since he had opened this panel. There was a single book in this panel and he quickly opened it.

The Starry Sky Qi Absorption Method.

He had learned this on the first day of playing the game and had not checked it ever since. He clicked on the book and tried to see if there was anything there so that he could reread that book.

Unfortunately, he couldn't. "Wait a second," he thought. "Maybe there is a cultivation method on the outside," Alex thought.

He immediately logged out and looked for a cultivation method. It took him a while, but he managed to find an earth-grade cultivation method, the entire thing.

However, it was mostly just squiggly lines from Alex's perspective. He could understand a few words, but not everything. "It seems they copied the original thing without translating it," he thought He knew

He took his laptop next to the capsule and logged in. As soon as he was in, Alex tried to learn the language of the cultivation world, rather than try to translate the book one by one.

Once he felt like he knew a lot, he got out and translated as much as he could. Once he was done with the first iterations, he remembered what he missed and went back to learn some more.

He repeated it for nearly 3 hours until he fully learned a new language in the real world.

"That should definitely not be possible, "Alex thought. This just went to add more evidence to his theory.  After another hour or so, he was finally done fully translating the whole book.

The cultivation method was called the Serene Earth Qi Absorption technique. It was around 5 thousand words long and could be read by Alex in under 10 minutes.

Alex sat on his bed with the cultivation method in his hand. "Let's do this."