Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

Alex looked at the floating piece of the blade just next to the crack in space. It was so close that he could just reach in and pull it out.

Qi didn't seem to work there, so if he wanted to pull it out, it had to be done by hand.

However, that was not what Alex intended to do at the moment. What he wanted to do was instead push it further. So, he took the other half of the blade that was still attached to the hilt and used it to push the floating blade deeper into the crack.

For a while, nothing happened. However, at some point, the blade suddenly vanished from his sight, gone somewhere never to come back.

Alex waited but that was indeed the last time he would ever see that sword. "So it disappears if it goes any further huh?" he thought.

"Never put anything in there that you don't want to lose," Alex made a mental note for himself and tossed the rest of the blade inside. It hovered within his reach again and would disappear if he sent it any further.

But this was going to be a different test. Instead of doing anything to the blade, Alex was going to manipulate the space itself.

He wondered, what would happen if he were to close this spatial crack. Would the item inside remain right here? Or would it disappear?

There was only one way to find out.

The spatial crack disappeared and closed as much as it could. The crack itself could not disappear, but the gate could. Alex hoped that was considered the same thing as his experiment would fail quite a bit if it wasn't.

He waited for a while before opening the crack again. No longer was the blade there anymore. It had disappeared to someplace far away inside this… different dimension.

He tried once again, this time with a random branch. He kept the branch right by the crack and waited a full day while it was open. In the entire time, it was open, the branch remained right where it was.

Then, he closed the crack, just for an instant, and opened it back up. The branch was still there. Then, he closed it for a little longer and the branch was still there.

However, when he closed the crack for more than 3 seconds and opened it back up again, the branch was gone.

Alex tested with various things and realized that the space inside the crack, while it was open, was quite stable. However, once he closed it, within seconds, the space inside would follow the chaos that was everywhere else, rendering whatever was inside it permanently gone.

Which was to say he should never get in there and risk having the crack close up on him.

But… what if he did? What if he did go in? Would he die? Was there air inside he could breathe? There certainly was no Qi, at least not one he could feel.

'What happens if I put in something long and push it as deep as I can?' Alex wondered. He searched in his storage ring for what he could find and brought out a bamboo that was a few meters long.

The bamboo was a True rank ingredient, but he didn't care for the moment. For now, he was too focused on his task at hand of figuring out if the space inside shredded anything that went in there or not.

He slowly poked in with his long bamboo and watched how far it could go. After about a meter in, Alex suddenly felt an incredibly strong force pull on the bamboo.

Alex held his ground and didn't let it go, but the force was so strong that he would certainly get dragged in if he kept it up any longer.

The bamboo snapped in two outside of the crack while the piece that went in was lost, dragged in by the ever-turbulent space inside.

Alex finally felt the fear that he had been keeping aside until now. The beautiful silver and purple cacophony now looked like a terrible mixture of colors that were solely created to destroy anything that dared touch them.

With how easily the bamboo broke off, he wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that the space inside the crack could turn everything to shred.

"Wait, but no," Alex thought. "The bamboo broke outside, not inside. If it was torn to shred, then the one I'm holding wouldn't have remained intact."

Alex fell into thought when he realized that he had come to the wrong conclusion. "So did the space inside not destroy the bamboo, but just pull on it so hard that it had to break outside? " Alex thought.

If that was the case, then he just needed to pull on it harder, right?

Alex decided to try again but there was nothing else with him that was this long. He had sold all the different weapons already and the ingredients were mostly small by comparison.

"I still have the whip," he thought, but using the Saint Whip felt just wrong. It didn't feel right to use his whip on something that might destroy it.

"Ah, I don't have to," Alex thought and pulled out a bunch of clothes he had. These were clothes he had bought and kept for himself.

He soon tied the robes together to make a lengthy rope that was at least 5 meters long. Then, he tossed one end into the crack and immediately felt the pull.

It was like a vacuum sucking on everything in the area onto itself, or a great gravitational pull that was hard to move away from.

Alex pulled on it as hard as he could, and finally, after pulling on it long enough, the rope of robes came back out of the crack.

Alex checked the robe as soon as it was out and was surprised. "Space Aura? Of course, that place should be ripe with aura," he said to himself. He wondered if he could train in there, but he wasn't going to try that anytime soon.

He thought of putting his hands in to check as well, but he didn't want to get pulled in of course.

He sat around, experimenting with some more minor things as he kept on closing and opening the crack as much as he could.

After some time, Alex realized something he hadn't caught up on.

"The crack is getting smaller?" he thought in surprise. He had been using it so much that he didn't realize that the crack itself was on the verge of disappearing.

Instead of looking like a shattered glass pane, it now looked like a thin piece of crack on the glass, and it would continue to fade if Alex kept using it as he was now.

Alex moved away from the crack and frowned a bit. If the crack disappeared, he wouldn't get to learn much about it. And he really wanted to learn more about it.

But he couldn't continue using the crack as it was. What he needed was a new crack altogether.

A new rift in space, which Alex very soon realized that only he could create himself.

"Well, time to learn how to properly cut space then."