Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

The fire burned silently under the cauldron, preparing it for the next set of ingredients that wouldn't come for a while.

Alex was like the fire too, silent and hot. He didn't know what to think now that he had realized the reason for being worse at alchemy than his other soul.

His Yang energy was building up in his body. It was the same as his master, whose Yin energy built up so much that she couldn't perform alchemy for a long time.

'I must be producing heat around me like Master produced coldness,' Alex thought. It had only been a day since he had gotten the Celestial grade body, so it was understandable that he wouldn't know how to control it yet.

However, he still felt like it sucked since he was intended to make so many healing pills. He didn't want to waste more time trying to relearn alchemy for his new body when he needed to go save Pearl as soon as he could.

He tried to think of ways to counter his heat for now. 'I should be able to contain it for now right?' he thought.

Even his master who would freeze everything around and her make him fear could contain it, so he should be able to as well.

He took a deep breath and tried to contain any aura he was sending out of him right now. He slowly felt the yang energy with his body and willed it to come back to his body.

Surprisingly, it didn't take any more persuading for the Yang energy to enter his body and go deep within him. Within seconds, the yang energy emanating from his body vanished without a single sign.

'That… is weird,' he thought. He remembered his master still having a cold aura around her even when she had completely taken in everything she could.

"Am I doing better because of my Supreme Yang Root?" Alex wondered. That was the only answer that made sense.

He nodded to himself once he was fully done with controlling his aura. Then, he proceeded to make more pills.

This time, there were no mistakes. At least, there were no mistakes that he made by not being able to control the flames like before.

There were still many mistakes, many mysteries to creating pills themselves that Alex probably had no clue about.

He continued making the same pill as before and in the next 10 minutes, turning all of the ingredients into powder.

Next up, was the time to form the pill. As before, he understood that he could split the pill if he wanted to, but he decided not to do that again.

Since he was making a healing pill, it was better to have a single good pill, than 2 mediocre ones.

So, he formed the powder into a single compact pill that could hold more of the energy.

Once the pill formed, Alex brought it out and looked at it. "Hmm… 34%, that's actually pretty good," he thought.

It was only his second try at making pills, and he had already reached a level that would take others over 10 years to reach with common pills.

This rejuvenated Alex's motivation to make more pills. So, he continued making healing pills for the next 2 hours.

Over the course of the 2 hours, on multiple occasions, his yang energy escaped from his body while he was focused on the pills and disturbed his process again.

They weren't as bad as the first time, but his pills still came out worse than desired during those moments.

However, the times he did have them in check, the pills came out quite well. In fact, one of the pills even reached 40% harmony, despite Alex didn't really do anything different.

He was quite happy about that. Unfortunately, he couldn't continue to make the healing pills since his ingredients were finished.

'I ran out so fast,' he thought. There was a pile of ingredients in his own bag that were of no use to him just because he didn't know what pills they could make.

Alex would have to do some tests with them once he was more comfortable with making True pills.

After the healing pills were made, Alex decided to make some other pills he could use to sell for money or use to gather more Qi to breakthrough.

He prepared his ingredients, made sure his Yang energy was in check and started making pills once more.

As he continued making the pill, and the pill was finally ready to be formed, something in him told him that he should try to make this one into two.

Not only would he be able to contain more of the energy using the two pills, it would also be a test on how the thing exactly worked.

Since the other Alex never figured it out, he was going to find out what was happening.

One thing he knew that the other Alex didn't was that, the 'pill-splitting Qi' as he called it was actually a technique, most likely created by the Alchemy god himself, that could be used to separate the pill into two parts.

Similar to what the previous Alex encountered, the technique was mostly automatic in that it formed the pills on its own and even forced energy into them. The only difference now was, Alex had the ability to dictate when to use it.

He no longer had to worry about the pills accidentally splitting when he needed a single, better pill.

Alex employed the technique, and the Qi in his body started moving. They went around his body in a certain pattern and released it in front of him to carve a divide in the powder and slowly form them into two separate spheres of the same size as what the original pill would have looked like.

Alex watched curiously as the vortex started once more that sucked in the energy from the cauldron into the pills.

Once the pills formed, Alex brought them out and checked them.

'24% and 25% harmony, huh?' he thought. 'Meaning, I could have done about 49% if I knew what the technique did.'

He tested the pills and bit and noticed that the two pills were quite hollow, compared to what a normal pill could be. After all, the two pills were formed from the powder that should have formed a single pill.

'Hmm,' Alex thought. 'Since a single pill is supposed to have all the energy in the powder, I guess it makes sense that half the powder can only store half the energy.'

'But that still doesn't answer why the two pills have collectively more energy than what a single pill would have,' Alex wondered. This was something the previous Alex had wondered as well without any luck.

'I should focus on finding this answer,' Alex thought. 'Also, how does pill tester work? How are they able to tell how much harmony a pill has? Isn't Percentage supposed to be relative to the pill? That would make this 25% make no sense.'

He wondered what criteria the tester considered when it formed its assessment. Whatever it was, Alex didn't know. There was not a single piece of information in his brain about the pill testers themselves aside from how to make one.

'So… we only know the blueprint to the testing system itself huh?' Alex thought.

He shook his head and forgot about the questions for now and continued making the pills. Over the course of the next few hours, he made quite a lot of pills.

The highest of which reached 48% on a pill with Metal energy as the final energy. He was so happy to see that he was getting so close to making Heaven-grade True pills.

After he was done, Alex left the production hall. The sun had just gone down, and the lanterns around the sect crater were starting to burn to illuminate the area.

Shouts of fighting still rang from where the fighting stage was. Alex walked the opposite way went back to his sister's house.

When he arrived, he noticed that the door was locked, so he went to find his sister.

As expected, she was training along with Du Yuhan in their Master's training room.

Alex went in and watched as his sister attacked with all her might, sending out slashes, and ice spears at Du Yuhan.

Du Yuhan on the other hand was focused on using Sword Intent as well as his more polished Sword Qi to block the attacks and even force some back towards Luo Mei.

Alex watched the two of them fight for a while before the two decided to stop.

"Do you want to fight too, brother Yu?" Du Yuhan asked.

"It's fine," Alex said. "You guys can fight."

Du Yuhan looked at him with a weird face and asked, "Won't you need to train some more now that you only have one arm to use? Surely you don't think fighting will be the same with a single-arm compared to two right?"

"Hmm, you aren't wrong in that," Alex said. "It would be good to learn how to use sword in ways that benefit me, but unfortunately I don't have my sword now. I broke it in the fight a week ago."

"Excuses," Du Yuhan said. "You can get comfortable with a sword you get later on. For now, use a common sword as I do."

"Come, let's fight."

Alex thought for a bit. He really didn't want to fight as he didn't believe there was any way for Du Yuhan to win against him. However…

"Sure," Alex said with a smile. The temptation to fight was too much for him.