Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

Alex walked into the only empty room and sat on the empty bed. He then called Pearl out, but immediately told him to not make any noise.

"Why?" Pearl asked.

"Send your spiritual sense out and you'll understand why," Alex said. Pearl did as he was asked and quickly saw the people that were around him.

"Alright, let's start cultivating," Alex said to Pearl. Pearl's skin started glowing a bit and soon there were cuts all over Alex's body too.

Alex closed his eyes and started breathing in and out calmly. Before he even knew it, he had fallen into a trance that led him to fall unconscious.

Early in the morning, he woke up from his sleep and opened his eyes. He quickly sent out his spiritual sense and saw that the man from yesterday was absent.

Alex had a general idea where he might have gone to, but he didn't care much about it. He stopped Pearl from cultivating any more and logged out.

He had some breakfast with the ladies and returned back to the game. He logged into the room at around 8 am and started planning for the day.

"What's my plan for today?" he thought.

"I… need to get registered as a Core disciple of the sect, then I will have to challenge someone at rank 50 to get their house, and then I should spend the day learning formations. I can then practice with master afterward," Alex thought to himself.

So, he got out of the room and walked out of the house without letting anyone know. He walked towards the left side of the mountain, instead of going to the right and walking up the mountain.

The road going left also curved and went up the mountain too before finally reaching a road where every horizontal road ended up. The road would then follow the curve of the crater to reach directly into the crater.

Alex looked at the many disciples and elders that were already working on their day. Some were going to the library, while some were going to the production hall.

'The Fighting Hall should open up in about half an hour. Since today is a limitless challenges day, there should be a lot of people that plan to fight. I should be ready,' Alex thought.

Alex went to the disciple hall that was just a simple building. Although it was called a disciple hall, it was also the Elder hall of the sect. The elders mostly worked out of buildings so the sect had never bothered creating a hall for them.

Similarly, since this was the Elder Hall, there were no disciples working in this place, and all the tasks were handled by the elders themselves.

Alex got into one of the many queues and waited for the people to move on. After a few minutes, he finally came face to face with the elder working there.

The elder was a man that looked to be in his 50s. Perhaps due to his old age, the elder decided to take on this desk job rather than being a referee for the fighting stages which was a way more active job.

"Badge!" the elder said without even caring about how he looked. He seemed to be too tired by the monotonous job while not wanting to do anything different.

Alex took out his badge with the number 2144 and handed it to the elder.

The elder took the badge and looked at the number written on it. He then looked at the disciple in front of him, and then back to the badge.

There was a level of cognitive dissonance happening in his mind right now by 3 different sets of information that were clashing with each other.

He was currently looking at a Meridian tempering 1st realm cultivator, who was normally what the sect called the core disciple, wearing a robe that belonged to an inner disciple, bringing a badge that belonged to an outer sect disciple.

After processing the information for more than 5 seconds, the elder came to a single conclusion.

"Is this a joke? Are you messing with me?" he started to get angry.

"Sorry?" Alex asked. He was confused by the sudden outburst of the elder too.

"Where is your core disciple robe? Where is your actual badge?" the elder asked. "Don't you know that stealing someone else's badge is a crime punishable by expelling?"

Alex finally understood what the problem was. "Ah, no elder. I did not steal any badges. This is my badge, and this is my robes. I was out of the sect for a little while without the sect's authority, so my rank declined while I was out."

"At the same time, I also broke through to the Meridian Tempering realm. So I came here today to get my new robes. As for my badge, I will go fight someone in the 50th rank as soon as the Fighting hall opens up," Alex said.

The elder thought for a while and found that what the disciple was saying was indeed possible and that he had gotten angry a bit too early.

"That is a sound excuse, however, I still do not know if what you are saying is true. Do you have any elders or other trustworthy disciples that can vouch for you?" the elder asked.

Alex chuckled a little and said, "Yes, I do. I don't know if you have heard of it or not, elder, but I am the sect leader's new disciple."

"You can ask him, or my senior sister, Luo Mei, or my senior brother, the Guard leader, Liu Xun," Alex said.

The elder's eyes suddenly went wide. He had indeed heard about the Sect Leader's elder coming back. "I see, wait a second for me to confirm," the elder said and pulled out a talisman to send and receive messages.

The elder talked in the talisman for a few moments and made a weird face as he put it down. "Did you beat any core disciples before today?" he asked.

"Oh yes, I beat Huo Tu about 2 months ago. He was… 18th rank at that time if I remember correctly," Alex said.

"I see. I have confirmed it is you, disciple Yu. Welcome back," the elder said as he brought out a set of robes and a few other talismans that told him about the rules and regulations the core disciples had to follow.

"Thank you, Elder," Alex said and walked away. He put the robes into his storage bags and made his way to the fighting hall.

As he was walking there, he stopped and turned left.

Just as he remembered, it stood there in all of its glory and magnificence. It was still unknown to everyone what it was, but Alex knew that most probably, this was the most important thing in the entire Tiger sect.

The Black Stele.

The Black Stele stood there in the middle of the crater as if it was the one that caused it. Looking at the shape of the crater, it most likely did.

The Black Stele didn't have anything guarding it or any perimeter around it to stop the disciples from walking in. Alex slowly walked up to the stele and placed his hands on it.

The last time he was here, he had hastily used his spiritual sense to read it and was traumatized when his spiritual sense had been nearly depleted. After that, he had always been afraid of the stele and stayed away from it.

But now, he was a different person. Not only had he learned more about the world and was more mature than he was last time, his spiritual sense was also at least 3 times more in quantity and a bit stronger than last time.

He also had the added benefit of knowing what would happen if he didn't put his spiritual sense under control.

"Oh, it's not metal," Alex thought as he touched the black stele. Although it did look like stone, Alex still believed that the black stele was totally made out of metal due to the iridescent colors that the letters in it shined in.

"What sort of rock it this?" Alex thought as he knocked on it. He didn't have much knowledge about stones so he was totally blank on the answer.

"Should I test it once more?" he thought. He still had some lingering fear from last time, but he was confident he wouldn't lose all of his spiritual sense this time.

"Here goes nothing," he thought and spread out his spiritual sense. Slowly, he approached the text on the stone and started reading it.

Immediately, as if retaliating, something grabbed onto his spiritual sense and followed the thread back to attack his spiritual sea.

Alex read as much as he could and immediately stopped his connection to that thread of spiritual sense. When he was done and safe, he quickly checked his spiritual sea and saw that nearly half of it had been destroyed.

'Damn, that's truly terrifying. If I had spent a second longer reading, I would have lost it all again,' he thought. Spending all of his spiritual sense while he was outside of this spiritual sea wasn't dangerous at all.

However, it still hurt like a god damn b*tch.

He didn't dare try it again and tried to remember what he had just read. "… weapon?" Alex thought. He didn't know what words meant, so he could only go off of what information his mind got.

Most of the words seemed normal everyday words, but two of them gave an idea of what the thing is written on the stele was about.

One of them said 'weapon' and another one said  'attack'.

"So, it's an offensive technique that requires you to use a weapon?" Alex thought and was a little disappointed. Similar to Heaven's Impact, he also wanted this technique to be a spiritual technique.

Alas, it wasn't. "I shouldn't have got my hopes up so much. At least, since this language came from the Immortals or whatever, this should be a pretty good technique, right?" Alex thought.

"Whatever, I will think about this once again when I eat those mental pills and enter or maybe even exceed the Mind tempering realm. My spiritual sense should get a little stronger after that," Alex thought.

He left the black stele and went towards the Fighting hall. By now, the fighting hall had fully opened up and so Alex got in line.

He didn't bother changing his robes as he would do that after the fight. The queue was already long so he had to wait for a few minutes before he could register a fight.

Finally, it was his turn and so he spoke to the elder.

"Good Morning, Elder. I would like to register a fight with the disciple at rank 50.