Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

Come morning, Alex was feeling pretty lethargic. He had enough energy to go for much longer, but mentally he had already tapped out.

The monotonous making of the same pill over and over was just too much for him.

He looked at the pill bottle in his hands and smiled. The green-tinted bottle contained one of the best pills he had ever made.

A 73% harmony common rank pill. Without the assistance from his Supreme Metal roots, this was the best pill he had created without a doubt.

Adding onto the fact that every single aspect of this pill from the very first creation came from him made him even more proud of his achievement.

He took back his cauldron and took a deep breath as he finally caught a break from all the pill-making. "Sigh, that took so long. From what I can see, I have around 30% chance to improve the pill?" he thought.

"Geez, I didn't even get to do anything about my new cultivation base before I started making pills. Thank god I didn't go through any Qi deviation or some such,' he thought.

He walked out of the alchemy room and went back to his room. Just as he was walking there, he felt something uncomfortable happening to him.

His body started itching uncontrollably. He stopped to see what was happening, but he couldn't find any reason why.

"What the hell? Am I having an allergic reaction to something?" he thought. He continued walking, and suddenly, the itching started turning to pain.

"Huh? Did it change?" he thought. He walked closer to his room and the pain got more intense until finally, his entire body started having nothing but cuts all over him.

"Wait for a second," he thought and quickly opened the door. As he expected, Pearl was inside calmly cultivating.

"Oh, so that's why it's happening," he thought. "Wait, does distance affect our cultivation?"

Alex had never in the past 6 months been away from Pearl while he was cultivating, so he had no idea what would happen if Pearl cultivated while he was away.

Pearl also hadn't yet cultivated out of his own volition and this was the first time.

"Pearl, can you stop?" he asked.

"Meow?" Pearl suddenly got up from his meditative position and stared up straight at Alex. "MEOW!!" he asked where Alex was.

"I was making some pills. Sorry, I took forever," he said. "Did you start cultivating on your own?"

"MEOW!" Pearl said. He wanted to grow stronger so he could fight off more beasts during his training session.

"Alright, let's go train soon then," Alex said and logged out.

He went to the bathroom to freshen up and quickly walked out. As he did, he couldn't help but smash his face with his palm for forgetting the one thing he was supposed to do.

"I got distracted so badly," he thought. He had forgotten to make the formation to improve his skin. "I will have to do that after the training. Hopefully, the 300 yang jades help a lot."

He went to the kitchen to grab his breakfast and returned quite soon.

After he logged back into the game, Alex went to the garden to find Yao Jia. Yao Jia was as usual tending to the garden, and once Alex found her, they went to train.

"Oh wait, you broke through?" Yao Jia said with a surprised face when she realized that Alex was stronger once again.

"Yes, last night," Alex explained.

"What? How are you so fast?" she exclaimed. "That's unfair."

"Uh, yeah, sure," Alex said. "Can we continue?"

They fought for a while longer as Alex got familiar with his new strength. His strength and speed had increased by a lot. Also, his ability to process information in real-time was also a lot better.

He was mentally faster now as well.

As for his Qi, they were vastly stronger as well. Unfortunately, against someone in the True King realm, they did little to no effect, so he couldn't really understand how good they were.

The training lasted for an hour longer before they stopped. "Whew! That was a good session," Alex said.

"Congrats on entering the True realm," Yao Jia said in the end.

"Thank you," Alex said. They walked out together and went to Pearl's room where he too was training with some beast.

Alex waited for him to finish.

"Ah right, any news on the people that entered the secret realm?" Alex asked.

"Nothing important I guess. I heard 2 of them got overconfident and tried to fight a beast, but they were swiftly killed. Now they must be looking for a way back," she said.

"Can they go out if they wanted to?" Alex asked.

"Yes, it's pretty easy. They just have to know the method to unlock the formation. Given that they got in, they must know the way out too," Yao Jia said.

"I see," Alex said.

Pearl finished his training and the two of them left the palace to go into the garden to bask in the sun.

After an hour or two of staying in the sun, Alex returned back to his room.

"Alright, stay here okay. I will need to do something in the room over," he said and left his room to go to the next one.

He walked into a completely empty room and measured it with his eyes. "This should be enough," he thought. It was time to make the formation.

"Can I even make a dent on the floor though?" he wondered and brought out his sword. He tried to carve something on the floor, and he found it really hard to do. But, fortunately, carving was possible.

"Let's not use the sword. It's too hard with it," he thought and kept back his sword.

He stretched out his right arm and suddenly golden lights converged onto it. Quickly, sharp tips formed on his fingers that turned to claws.

"This hopefully does it," he thought and tried to carve onto the ground again. It was hard, but with this, he had a lot more control over the strokes of the formation.

"Alright, I can't make any mistakes. This is my one shot, one opportunity," he thought and started by carving a giant circle that went around the room from edge to edge.

He tried his best to keep the circle as circular as possible as only that would give him the most efficiency.

Once the circle was done, he market the different nodes and started carving a straight line in between the nodes.

Some nodes had multiple connections to them, some had few. Alex had to make sure he didn't mess up on a single stroke since that alone could spell failure to his entire project.

He went slowly and steadily, and after 25 minutes, he finally managed to fully carve out all of the formations.

"Phew!" he wiped away his sweat and looked at the formation. He made sure that every node, every angle, every stroke was as perfect as it could be.

Once he was sure, he proceeded on to the next part of the task. He needed to now calculate just how many he would have to put onto the different nodes.

"Hmm, since it will only activate when the total energy is in balance, there is no way to mess it up right?" Alex thought.

He quickly counted the total number of Yang Jades he had and started dividing the number by the number of nodes and the number of strokes.

He got a rough estimate in his mind and put that amount into each of the nodes. In total, the 289 yang jades were distributed amongst the 8 nodes in a not-so-equal number.

The rough estimate didn't help Alex at all since the formation didn't start. So, he had to go through a period of trial and error to see what worked.

"Distance between the nodes also means the amount should be different right?" he thought and changed the number there.

"Hmm, this one is quite alone, so maybe I should put more here." He brought a few jades from the other nodes and put them in there.

Alex spent the next hour and a half simply tinkering with the number of jades he had on his hand, failing to make the formation run.

"Let's put this one here, and…" suddenly, a light started shining from the formation. Alex's eyes went wide.

"I DID IT!"