Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy
chapter-2016

Nearly an entire year passed during which Alex managed to progress just to the edge of entering the next realm. He was so close, that it would have been wise of him to get away from work for a while and focus on breaking through.

However, after much consideration, Alex had decided to wait. It wouldn't be a long wait, just a few months at best. But at the end of those few months, not only would he enter the next Immortal realm, but so would Pearl.

Pearl had reached the very end of his Saint Transformation realm and could enter the Immortal realm if he wanted to. However, just to make sure that he learned as many Dao as he could, he decided to wait a while.

Not only that, Pearl also needed to prepare himself before breaking through. He would have to fight an Inner Demon, and while he was certain there wouldn't be any problem, he still needed to prepare for it.

Since Pearl's breakthrough was a big event, not just to him, but to anyone who would be watching, Alex planned on using his breakthrough as a disguise to hide Pearl's breakthrough.

He couldn't let people see a white tiger breaking through in this place. That would cause a lot of questions he wasn't ready to answer.

As for Whisker, he was still decades away from reaching Immortality. Whisker had a decent talent in cultivation and would be considered one of the more talented people when compared to others. But because he was together with monsters like Alex and Pearl, his cultivation lagged a lot behind.

To make use of the time he wasn't cultivating as much, Alex dedicated it all to the Spiritual Conjunction technique. Using a pill to cultivate was a first for him, but the technique was intuitive enough that he easily understood it and mastered it.

Within just a few months, he had already learned it, and now he was improving his spiritual energy at a steady rate.

The rate of improvement was also quite terrifying as within a year of getting the technique, Alex crossed nearly 3 realms. His Spiritual energy was now his second strongest strength out of all of his strengths.

However, there wasn't much need to be too happy from what Alex could tell.

While the technique worked, there was also a drawback that he noticed. The technique couldn't improve his Spiritual energy to become stronger by itself. It needed the Spiritual energy to make itself stronger.

What that ended up doing was that to become a denser version of themselves, the Spiritual energy would clump together. While that was technically what he had wanted, it had also left him with less Spiritual energy than he started.

If he had started with 100 tier 1 spiritual energy and wanted to get them to tier 2, the technique would have helped so. But in doing so, it had also dropped the total amount from 100 to about 95.

It wasn't a big enough problem that Alex had to stop right away, but it was enough to be of slight annoyance. The book he got had what would happen written on it though, so he couldn't complain. If he ever had a problem, he could just stop. The Spiritual energy would increase while he cultivated normally, and when he reached the cultivation base that matched the spiritual energy, it would be the same.

Alex decided that it was a good idea to have a stronger tier of his Spiritual energy, even if it was lower in amount, so he didn't stop.

He also practiced the Spirit Reversal technique, but there was nobody to practice it with, so he had no idea how decent he had become with it.

Alex also focused on improving his Sword Domain and Body Cultivation, but at the end of the day, he couldn't do it as much as his work took the majority of his time.

He was working as a regular on one particular day when Fang Yuxie told him that the guild master of the Blackfrost sect had come in to meet him. He was in the middle of taking care of a patient so the man would have to wait a bit.

After a while, Alex let Wang Yanwei deal with the next few patients while he went to talk with the old man.

The guild master of the Blackfrost guild seemed to put on an expression of horror when he saw Alex as if he were seeing a ghost walk up to him. Alex was a little concerned as to why that was exactly.

"It has been a while, senior," Alex said. "Are you back on inspection?" "No," the old man said in a rather loud tone before looking around and shaking his head. He grabbed Alex by the shoulder, surprising him, and pulling him to the side where the customers couldn't see entirely.

As soon as they were in the corner, a layer of dark fog surrounded them, making Alex scared for a second. He could feel the chill from the fog, which was the first time in a long time he had felt such a thing.

There was some sort of Yin dao in that dark fog, but it was so distant from the Dao of Yin itself that Alex had no way of protecting himself using the dao alone.

He quickly began using up his Yang Qi and only then did the cold no longer feel uncomfortable.

"Senior, what are you doing?" he asked. "You're scaring me a little."

"Huh? Oh, I'm sorry. I'm just so rattled seeing you here," the man said. "Why are you here?"

"This is my shop. Where else would I be?" Alex asked the old man.

"The Blue Silk sect. You should be taking the entrance test right now. Everyone left this morning already. I thought you would be leaving too, and yet I find out that you didn't do that at all," he said.

"Oh," Alex said. "I didn't realize that was today."

"Of course it is today," the man said. "How could you not know? It's like you don't even care about joining the sect at all."

"I don't have to," Alex said before sending the man the final bit of information through his spiritual sense. "I have already joined the sect."

The man was about to go off on something else when his mind finally processed the information and he paused. "What?" he asked.

"I already joined the sect," Alex told him through his spiritual sense. "I already did that last year."

He pulled out the Blue Silk sect's emblem and nameplate and showed it to the man.

Guild master Blackfrost looked at the two items in Alex's hands with a look of pure awe. Never in his life would he have expected to come here today to ask a junior why he hadn't taken an entrance test, only to find out he had already joined the sect.

"How… how did this happen?" he asked. "When did you—"

"Last year," Alex said.

"But… I heard you fainted because of something," the man said next. "And speak out loud. No one can hear us right now."

"Oh!" Alex said, surprised. He hadn't seen any sort of formations going up.

Was it because of this dark fog? What was this thing exactly?