879 That Corpse
Due to the second method having fewer cons for him, Alex decided to make multiple pills in a single cauldron.
Since this was the first time he was trying something like that, he started with a common rank pill.
He had plenty of ingredients, so Alex brought out his cauldron and started heating it.
Heat… that would be the most important thing for him to keep track of here as even the slightest deviation in it would affect how the ingredient was shaped as a result.
Alex took a deep breath and prepared the ingredients. He portioned the ingredients as per the recipe, increasing the amount by twice in all cases.
He then brought the temperature of the flame and cauldron to the required level and placed them in the first set of ingredients.
Putting in twice the ingredients, Alex had to make sure to separate them onto the two sides of the cauldron so that they didn’t gather up and get heated evenly.
At the same time, he made sure that the temperature of the cauldron never changed at all.
The world was pushing Qi into the cauldron constantly as Alex used his authority over Heat and used his Dao.
Once the first set of ingredients turned into powder, Alex immediately moved it away from the direct head and placed it in the 2nd set of ingredients.
Once again, he separate the ingredient so as to not crowd them up and changed the temperature as required.
He continued doing the same for the following ingredients until all of them had turned into powder. Then, he quickly poured the energy into the powder and formed them into two different pills without using his pill forming technique as that only worked for a single pill.
He brought out the pills and excitedly checked on them.
72%, and 74%.
“Hmm, for being my first try and not using the pill forming technique, this is actually quite good,” Alex thought.
These were Common pills sure, but at the point he was, Common pills and True pills didn’t have much difference to him given how far above he was from having either of them being difficult for him to make.
“Hmm, let’s try with the True pills then,” he thought. He needed to make a choice on what to make.
Given the recent demands for pills that helped one cultivate faster in between the True realms, he decided to make those pills.
He ended up on a pill, the recipe of which was in his mind since a decade ago.
As he went on to double the now required ingredients in his mind, a thought came to him that made him feel a bit weird about some things.
For millennia now, the Western Continent was without any connection to the outer world, and yet it was still not doing very bad in terms of Alchemy.
Actually, it was doing better in terms of recipes because of the Demon realm they robbed and the meteor shower.
“Wait, is there really no recipe in the Northern continent that’s not available in the Western Continent?” he thought.
It had been over a week, and he had made nearly 400 pills, and yet only a few of those were from recipes that he wasn’t aware of. And given what sort of recipes they were, Alex was certain they were only available in the Frozen Heart sect too.
So, from his experience, all the public recipes in the Northern continent were recipes he had already learned back in the Western continent, and the Western Continent in fact had way more.
“Did the continent really regress that back because of the quasi-ban on alchemy?” Alex thought. “No, how are the recipes even being shared around in the first place?”
That was when Alex realized something he had forgotten for a very long time. It was something that had happened to him during the very early part of his life in the sect where his body was being controlled by his clone’s soul.
“Is that it?” Alex’s eyes shined.
He remembered the time Wen Cheng had asked him to go somewhere with him and taken him along with some elders to a location in the southern forest where there was a formation in the middle of nowhere, growing Alchemy ingredients, that included some Spirit Cleansing lilies.
Later on, he had found the man behind the formation and garden, who was already dead underground.
Alex had taken away his storage bags that contained nothing but ingredients and recipes for pills and formations.
That was how he had acquired so many of those recipes. That was what made him learn all the recipes of the northern continent before even arriving here.
It wasn’t that the Western Continent had the recipes that were also available in the Northern Continent, but rather that corpse he had found, did.
That man was most likely someone from the Northern continent, and he had teleported to the Western continent.
Alex pulled out a talisman from his storage ring. It was kind of rugged at this point, but it could still be used, he knew that.
Lady Ren had told him that it would be usable in 10 years, and 10 years had already passed for him. If not, he could always go to the location with the extreme Water Qi and have the talisman recharged.
However, that was not why he took the talisman out for now. He was wondering what made the man teleport all the way to the western continent.
“No, he didn’t choose to go there. It was random,” Alex understood. But if it was random, then he could have arrived at any place in the world. Even the most dangerous places wouldn’t be out of reach, and yet the man had used it.
‘What prompted him to use such a dangerous talisman?’ Alex thought. Then, he remembered that not only was the man a formation maker, but also an Alchemist.
An Alchemist in the Northern Continent.
“Dear god, how bad is the situation here?” Alex feared. If a man would rather face uncertain death than whatever was going on here, then the situation must be more severe than he thought.
‘I should really make sure not to show my talent around here at all,’ he thought. He put back the talisman and shook his head.
What he had learned just now was something he hadn’t expected to, and in some ways, he would have rather not learned at all. Still, this was useful information, so he simply sighed and let it be.
“Yeah, let’s focus on making the pill for now,” he said to himself and thought back to the ingredients list he was thinking about when he got sidetracked.
Once he was done, Alex pulled out the ingredients and put them into the cauldron.
Despite being True rank ingredients, Alex didn’t have much trouble with them as he turned all the ingredients into powder one by one.
When he was done, the entire cauldron was full of powder from the ingredients on the bottom and their energy floating on the top.
The next process here would be to use Elemental Guidance to pour the energy into the powder, then turn the powder into a pill.
That was what he had done last time, which had made the two pills over 70% harmony.
However, for some reason, Alex thought of something else.
“Since I’m making two pills, will that work?” he thought. The powder had stayed in the heat for a slightly longer period of time, but that shouldn’t do much harm to the overall result.
Alex took a deep breath and Qi moved on its own through his body, releasing involuntarily out of his hands and into the cauldron.
As soon as they entered, they grabbed onto the entire pile of powder and halved them at once.
The powders were then very easily formed into pills and suddenly a vortex appeared above each of them, pulling in the energy from the surrounding into it.
Alex waited patiently for the pill-splitting Qi to do its work.
Not long after, the two pills were prepared and Alex quickly pulled them out before looking at their harmony.
He had made some errors towards the end where he had waited a bit longer than he should have, and still, he somehow acquired such amazing results.
88% and 92%.
“Holy… shit!”