Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

Since the snake was no problem to Alex, after a few minutes of battle, he easily subdued it. Killing it would've taken longer, but in front of the Three-headed Hydra, he didn't want to do so.

Alex grabbed the snake's left head and forced its fangs out, making it pour poison into an empty glass vial.

When the purple, viscous poison barely slid down the vial, making Alex wonder if it was perhaps more solid than liquid.

Alex put the Two-Headed Hydra back on the ground and plucked the Two-Colored Poison Lily flower as well. He then kept both of them in his ring and took out another empty vial before turning around.

"Senior, you've helped me so much, but I would like to request you one more thing," he said.

The snake looked at Alex then at the vial and understood. "You want my poison too?" the snake asked.

"Just a little, if it is not much trouble," Alex said.

"It isn't," the snake said and slid forward to Alex, immediately pouring poison into his vial.

"My task of looking after you ends here. I will take my leave now," the snake said and moved away with such a speed that Alex could barely tell the direction it moved in.

He couldn't even find the time to say his thanks to the snake.

Alex looked back at the even more viscous poison in the vial and couldn't help but be amazed that his body was able to clear such a terrifying poison in just 2 seconds.

That just gave him more proof that the poison he had been struck with back in the Forbidden Fields, the same poison that killed his master had actually been an Immortal grade or higher poison.

Alex wondered if he could have cured the poison in his body back then if he had sat down and cultivated. Even if it did not fully cure, it should have been able to slow down the poison's advance.

Then, his face fell as he realized that his master could've likely survived too had she cultivated during that time.

'But there was no Qi. We were suppressed,' he thought. He couldn't help but feel horrible at the thought that his master would have likely survived the battle with that old man had she only been able to cultivate after being poisoned.

The wounds wouldn't have stopped her at all since she had a lot of pills. It was all because they were suppressed.

Alex's face turned gloomy and his eyes welled up. But he quickly wiped it away and shook his head with a sigh.

"What's done is done. I can only live my life and keep moving forward like my master wanted me to," he thought and walked away from that location.

The swampland, for now, was a valley where every single plant and animal was either poisonous, venomous, or simply toxic.

Everything else that lived here could either survive toxicity or was simply too strong to care about poisons.

Alex kept walking… or floating. He stepped on the water, but his feet never sunk below it.

His yang aura was still flared out to the fullest and he was starting to wonder if that was a good idea or not.

It was helping him keep away the poison in the air, but it was also forcing him to make such yang being flared normality.

He knew he would suffer from this if he kept it for a long time. He was already suffering its effect as his Flickering Shadow technique was starting to perform worse and worse now.

Every time he teleported, he would appear close to where he wanted to, but not exactly where he chose to.

It had taken Alex not long to realize the problem. His body had a Yang constitution, with his Qi having heavy Yang properties. When he tried to create Yin with his body, it was hampered by his yang, and not all of it was made to the technique.

So, when he teleported, he fell short each time.

That was one problem his body was causing, but there were also others. Another problem he suffered was when he made pills. Every time he sat down to make pills, he would have to cultivate his yin cultivation technique for a long time to get rid of as much Yang as he could before starting.

Otherwise, he had a hard time even making pills most of the time if he didn't do that.

'I need to find some yin treasures and consume them. That should be able to help me balance it a bit more,' Alex thought.

With many of the poisons having yin attributes, he was sure he wouldn't have a hard time finding such treasures.

So, Alex went around the swamp, freely as there was nothing that could hurt him or surprise him, and roamed the land.

Every day, he found new plants or beasts that he recognized to be alchemy ingredients and took them. He fought monsters left and right with nothing but his sword.

Most of the time, he would be poisoned, but he didn't need to worry about that. A single circling of his cultivation removed all poison from his body.

Alex was surprised to see that plants here were more toxic than the animals. Most of the time, the animal was just cultivating the toxins the plant gave off, capturing them into their own body.

He was learning more and more about poison and venoms every day.

A few times, Alex even sat down to use the ingredients he had gathered to make some poison pills.

One of the pills he made, a Heart Wrenching Poison pill, even came out to be around 56%. He would have likely gotten more out of the other pills too, but splitting his concentration into igniting a flame under the cauldron without using his formation plates held Alex back quite a bit.

In the months that passed since Alex entered the poison swamp, he had gone nearly 30 kilometers into the heart of the swamp, or so he believed.

A few times, he even saw humans in the poison swamp, walking around with artifacts and talismans hovering in front of them to block the poison. The first time he had seen them, he was surprised. But once he realized that it was a normal occurrence for people to come here and gather ingredients for themselves, he relaxed.

No one really wanted to fight another person for no reason in a place where a breath of the air could likely kill you.

Alex also never tried to talk with those people either. Most left only an hour or two after getting there.

With only about 150 meters of range on his senses, he was sure there were many more humans that came to this place, but he only got to see these ones.

Alex's Sword Intent progressed quite a bit and he could now cut a normal True Lord 3rd realm beast in half without even using his Qi.

If he did use Qi, it would reach True lord's 5th realm.

"Can I even progress any further?" he thought, standing next to the corpse of a red-skinned lizard.

Its head and tail were cut in half, and half the scales on its body were gone, likely to Alex's ring.

Alex watched his sword and wondered if he had reached a bottleneck. His progress fell stagnant and while he felt like he could progress, there just wasn't any.

'Maybe I'm supposed to take a break and try again,' he thought, but that didn't feel right. It was like he was reaching the limit of his Intent and was having trouble understanding what he should have done next.

'Dammit! If I had some more time in the library, I would have learned about swords. Now, I'm stuck with doing what Du Yuhan told me to do,' he thought.

Finding your personality and putting it into your own Sword Intent. That was how Du Yuhan told him sword Qi was born.

"I really need to learn who I am," Alex thought. That was the only way forward.

Alex walked forward and reached the tree behind the dead lizard. There hung a fruit on the tree that was shaped like a litchee but was the size of Alex's head.

Even as Alex walked close, he could feel the familiar coldness that his master used to produce. This fruit had a Yin attribute to it.

Alex plucked the fruit from the tree and sat down beneath it to eat it. He opened one of the fruits and tore off a giant piece to eat it at once.

When it reached his stomach, he didn't immediately let his body get rid of it. Instead, he slowly permeated the fruit's energy throughout his body. Wherever the poison reached, the existing yang aura would come to get rid of it.

By the time he ate the entire fruit, it felt like Alex had cultivated his yin technique for a month continuously.

Alex put back the other 2 fruits into his ring as he would use those when the Yang flared back again.

During the next few months, Alex roamed around more of the poison swamp, stealing as many ingredients as he could find.

After nearly a year of being in this place, Alex was starting to get fed up. He wanted to leave, but he knew Shen Jing would be coming any time now, so he didn't leave.

As expected, not many days after, while Alex was fighting with a giant insect, a voice drifted to his ear.

Shen Jing was here.