Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

"Wait, what do you mean he's not a False Immortal?" Alex asked with a surprised look on his face. He even missed a bit and forgot to keep absorbing the death aura for a few moments.

Fortunately, the old man was too caught up in his own trauma to notice any changes around him.

"Godslayer, explain," Alex asked in his head.

"Ughh… it's hard to explain. Let me go at it from the top," he said.

"Wait," Alex said, stopping Godslayer. He then lifted his hands away from the old man.

"Urghh!" he made a small grunting sound.

"What's wrong? Was my death aura too hard to handle?" the old man asked.

"No, it's not the death aura," Alex said while still keeping a pained expression on his face. "The pill I ate before, its drawback is showing up. My meridians will flare for an hour or two now, making most of my Qi unusable."

"Oh, then…"

"I think you should go back, senior. I will need to refine this death aura anyway, so I should rest too. We should continue absorbing this tomorrow again," Alex said.

The old man slowly stood up and was surprised to feel a lot less pain than he was expecting. "That really works. I really did have a lot of death aura then," he said.

"You still do," Alex said. "You still have a lot, which should make you feel better once we remove it."

"Alright, I will come tomorrow. Rest, for now, don't make any pills in the meantime," the old man said.

"I won't," Alex said and watched the old man leave. Once he was gone, he slowly sat down and called out his two beasts before starting to cultivate with the two.

However, that was just a front for the talk that was shaking him from the core inside.

"Alright, explain now, in detail," Alex said as he appeared inside his mind. The silver mountain was visibly smaller than before, but Alex did not care for how much it changed.

No matter what changed about it, there was nothing happening to him that he could visibly link to the mountain anyway.

"Okay, let me ask you this first. What do you know about False Immortals?" the sword spirit asked.

Alex looked at him with a confused expression. "Just what you have told me until now, I guess? They are the people that have failed their breakthrough and can either no longer enter Immortality or choose not to."

"That is correct," Godslayer said. "And is there a way to tell if one False Immortal is stronger than the other, in the same way a Saint might be stronger than another Saint?"

"Umm… do False Immortals even have realms to go by?" Alex asked.

"That's exactly what I wanted you to learn. False Immortal don't have different realms because it's not a cultivation realm."

"False Immortal is a classification. Whether you survive and are the strongest being under the Immortal realms, or get beat up to half death and end up being a cripple, you are called a False Immortal all the same."

"Still, the regular people call the stronger failures False Immortal," Godslayer said.

"That… makes sense, but I don't understand your point. I hope you're going somewhere with this," Alex said.

"Of course I am. Just shut up and listen," Godslayer said. "Now, given the classification, you heard, would you call the old man a False Immortal?"

"Absolutely," Alex said. "He's someone who failed to break through to Immortality, so he is a False Immortal. Or are you using some weird context like 'he hasn't given up on immortality yet and can still try' to say that the old man is not a False Immortal?"

"Not exactly, but my logic is similar enough," Godslayer said. "Before I get there, however, let me ask you one question. Why are there barely any False Immortals in this world?"

Alex couldn't help but think deeply at the question. Why was it? He remembered the Black Tortoise telling him that the humans of this world had mixed their blood with the demon folks so much that they were basically a hybrid at this point with only the bad traits from the two.

However, if that were true, even if not all Saints could reach the peak, those that do should have failed just enough for there to be multiple False Immortals in this world.

Which meant one of two things was most likely happening. "There have been people who failed in their tribulation, but they either failed and died, or they failed and ended up as a cripple only to die not long after," Alex said.

"Then let me ask you this," Godslayer said. "What is a failure in this case?"

"Hmm… Inner Demons would only make you go through Qi deviation at best, so the failure should be the tribulation. They failed to survive the lightning strikes," Alex said.

"Yes. Now, what if I told you that when you start a lightning tribulation, 9 lightning bolts fall on you no matter what," Godslayer said. "More if they have dao."

"What if they don't have dao?" Alex asked.

"Then they won't even reach the peak of the Saint Transformation realm," Godslayer said. "The thing you should be focusing on is that people cannot complete their breakthrough without defeating at least the 9 lightning bolts for they are absolute. It is the dao lightning that you can choose to skip out on to fail that chance to break through."

Alex's eyes widened when he heard that. "Are you sure you're not misremembering?" he asked.

"Nonsense, I have tamed False Divinities and Celestials before. I would not be wrong about a simple False Immortal," Godslayer said.

"But… that doesn't make sense. If someone has to fight through all 9 lightning bolts to complete or fail their tribulation, then what the old man told us was a lie," Alex said. "Dammit, all that info and he lied."

"No," Godslayer said. "He did not lie. In fact, I was stupid enough to not have noticed before."

"Notice what?" Alex asked.

"Did you ever notice that for someone who is supposed to only be able to use Immortal Qi in this world with no Immortal Qi, his body had enough Qi to do stuff despite being over 8 thousand years old?" Godslayer asked.

Alex's eyes went wide. "Now that you mention it… that is weird. I was so focused on him having Immortal Qi that I didn't even question where he acquired it from."

"I should have known before, but I didn't give much thought to it. I only noticed the quality of his Qi when you drained his death aura. It's… not exactly Immortal, a little below that."

"I was confused about why that was at first. A Qi that was way stronger than Saint Qi, enough to be Immortal Qi, but not yet immortal Qi. If I'm not wrong, the old man can in fact collect Saint Qi, but his body, spirit, and Qi are so intertwined due to him being on his way to the Immortal realm that Saint Pills won't heal him."

"That begged the question in my mind as to why the old man even had a slightly weaker Qi in the first place compared to other False Immortals."

"Of course, the situation became much clearer when he explained it all himself," Godslayer said.

Alex thought for a moment as a realization hit him.

"When he said that he only survived 6 of the 9 lightning bolts that everyone is supposed to go through," Alex said as he understood what Godslayer was trying to say.

Everyone was supposed to take 9 lightning bolts regardless of if they could survive it or not. But the old man had only taken 6.

"Yes," Godslayer said. "I do not know how he could've done this. There are ways to pause your tribulations by using artifacts to conceal yourself, which he might have acquired from this so-called Founder of his."

"Nevertheless, calling this old man a False Immortal would be akin to saying that a half-made sword is a failure. You can't really label it that since it hasn't gone through it all, has it?"

"But we do know it will be a failure," Alex said. "If the sword had cracks forming on it halfway through, not able to handle even just the tempering phase of the process, the sword is a failure through and through. The only way to fix it would be to completely start the process from the beginning."

"The old man had already suffered from the 6th lightning, so there is nothing wrong with calling him a False Immortal in my eyes," Alex said. "I seriously doubt he had any method of surviving the last 3."

"One could argue with you for the first part, but that is not what you should be taking away from my words," Godslayer said. "You leave the tempering of a sword because it's a failure. But what if it heats back up?"

"So what? There's no point in continuing to temper the sword if I know it is a failure," Alex said.

"Yes, YOU see no point. But the heavens don't see it that way. If they see the metal glow hot, they will strike it again until it's either tempered or the metal shatters," Godslayer said.

As Alex heard that, his eyes started growing wide as he too understood what Godslayer was trying to say finally.

"What you're saying is… if the old man were to return to how he was before he was wounded, the tribulation that had stopped would continue… and he would die," he said.

"Yes," Godslayer said. "And for that to happen…"

"I will have to make the pill that will heal the old man completely," Alex thought.