Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

Upgrading Saint ranked pills' recipes were much harder than True ranked pills simply due to the scarcity of resources.

Fortunately, Alex had learned of some possible ways to do it all using as few resources as possible. Still, the ways were still just possibilities, so he needed to test them out a little first.

Alex pulled out one of the ingredients he had plenty of thanks to the Beast realm in the Western Continent and tested it how he normally would. He had a recipe for that ingredient, and for now, he simply followed that recipe.

Alex took notice of how quickly or slowly the energy was released and couldn't help but be surprised by how easy it was to follow that.

This was the first ingredient he was refining in 3 years. A first certainly since he had entered the Saint realm.

It somehow felt both familiar and distant at the same time.

Whisker watched from the side, taking in every little minute detail of what Alex was doing, and learned what he could from it. Alex also explained the best he could without losing attention.

"They definitely weren't wrong when they said Saint-ranked pills were hard to refine," he thought. The mental strain he felt while just refining a single ingredient was loads more than what he would feel with a True rank ingredient.

Were it not for his improved spiritual sense, Alex would've very much likely had to take breaks in between every 5 pills or so.

Now, he would be able to go on for at least 50 due to how fast his mental strength recovered.

Once Alex was done with refining the ingredient and memorizing what it did, he brought out the same ingredient again, only this time he wanted to test and see if it brought the same result with cut-up ingredients.

He tried half the ingredient at first and came up with the same result as when it was full.

He then tried a third of the ingredient, which brought the same result, and so did a fourth of the ingredient.

Alex tried with the 5th one and failed. He tried it once again and the 2nd time around it worked.

He was a little confused about why that was and tried it a few more times to realize that the rate at which the ingredient was receiving heat had lowered to a point where it was no longer the same.

"The surface area is too small so it's a hit or miss," Alex realized. At a certain point, the rate of heat being transferred to the ingredient was so low that it changed how the ingredient released its energy.

"Either I make sure the surface area is big enough, or I stop at a 4th of the ingredients," Alex thought. He decided to stop at a fourth its size. He would have to test it a few more times with other ingredients to see if size mattered differently for different types of ingredients, but for now, he ignored that as he stuck with the basics.

Next, Alex closed his eyes and thought back to a random True rank ingredient and picked 3 of its variations for the same recipe. He had done thousands of refinements, so it became easy to find one in his mind.

Once he found the 3 variations, he used the knowledge he gained from the Alchemy God's Knowledge to plot out a mental map of how the shapes changed as the heat, speed, and direction of the ingredient changed.

It was a little tough to do in his mind as he had never done something like this before, and he also had to consciously stop himself from thinking back to the answer he already knew.

He got a general idea of how it changed using the 3 points of reference and mapped out the entire thing.

Then, he compared what he came up with what he had in mind.

"Oh, that was so close," he thought. He compared the two until he had an idea why he was wrong and redid the same thing over and over with different True rank ingredients until he ended up on an accurate result.

He continued for a bit longer and only stopped after he was right 100% at least 10 times in a row.

Then, he returned back to the Saint rank ingredient, which he did the same with as well.

He had already made what could be considered the middle of the 3 different settings under which the ingredient was refined, so he did it with 2 others that were as far apart as he could keep them.

Once all 3 points of reference were ready, he used his newfound knowledge to plot them out. He found a certain line of information about the different shapes, which he now had to figure out was accurate or not.

Before that, however, he did the same thing with a quarter piece of the ingredient to make sure they did give the same result even when cut up.

Thankfully, they did, so he could move on to the more annoying part of the process. He now had to sit there and refine the ingredients many, many times over.

For the sake of preserving ingredients, he cut every one of the ingredients into 4 pieces before proceeding to the experiment.

It took him a whole day, but even though just half of it, he could see that he had got it right.

The technique that the Alchemy God had left behind for him to figure out the various shapes of the True ranked ingredients worked even on Saint ranked ingredients.

Once the whole day had passed, and his result was a success, Alex took half a day to cultivate himself back to his peak.

Then, starting the next day, he began improving the recipes to the best level they could be.

The world went about its days as Alex cooped up in the house he had rented and did nothing but improve the recipes. He made a few healing pills once he refined the recipes, but after that, He didn't bother making any more pills and only focused on the recipes for now.

The healing pills were the very first Saint-ranked pill he had ever made, pills that every saint would pay thousands upon thousands to buy from him.

And somehow, on his very first attempt, the pill had come out to be around 92%. Alex tried it 3 more times, and each came to be about 95% Harmony.

That surprised Alex for a bit, but once he gave some thought to it, it made sense why it would be so high.

He was using Supreme Elemental Accord to help improve the ingredients. Each ingredient he used was the best it could be. It was more of a surprise he wasn't getting a full 100%, but that was most likely due to the fact that the Profound Revolutions of Myriad Combinations techniques not being the best technique for forming pills.

That was still his Pill-Splitting Qi, which he was gradually getting closer and closer to figuring out how to use on a single pill. Or at least he hoped so.

There was another small problem Alex was facing at the moment, and that was the fact that his cauldron showed some signs of unstableness when making pills. The strain he had to put it through to refine Saint ranked ingredients was too much for a True Earth grade cauldron.

Still, it wasn't a big enough problem to damage his pills, so he ignored it for now.

It took him 2 weeks to finalize the recipes for the healing pills.

Once he finished making the healing pills, Alex moved on to antidotes for poisons, venoms, and toxins. Those took nearly a month altogether.

After those two, he moved on to Qi gathering pills, and pills that helped him break through. Each of these took about 4 days to 6 days, resulting in another month of work.

There weren't many pills that he could improve the recipes for. After all, he only had 20 recipes after all.

Even amongst them, he only had the ingredients for 17 of them, and those were the only ones he had improved.

"Sigh! Finally done," Alex thought as he finished fixing all the different recipes. It had taken him nearly 3 months, but it was worth it.

He finally took a few days of rest and simply cultivated all day long. The next few days were peaceful and without worry, and in such time, Alex felt his cultivation base reach the peak of the Saint Condensation first realm.

It had been close to 20 months since he had entered the Saint realm, but it was still a surprise to him that he was about to break through.

"It's been 5 years since I've come to this continent," he thought to himself. "I started as a True Emperor 4th realm cultivator, and now I'm entering Saint Condensation 2nd realm."

It had taken him such a long time to reach where he had and that made him wonder how much longer it would've taken him had he been using the Heaven grade version of the Five Yang Divine Path, and not the Immortal grade one.

"Very well, no point in waiting any longer," he thought and closed his eyes to meditate. Within an hour, Alex had easily broken through to the 2nd realm of the Saint Condensation realm without any big showing.

Once done, he cultivated a bit more to make sure his foundations were stable. After that, he left the house he had rented.

Since he was done with what he wanted to do, he decided to go back and see if his aunt was back from her training.