Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

He took the True rank pill and ate it. When he did, he felt the energy from the pill dissipate in his stomach, mix into his blood vessels, and find their way to his dantian.

Once there, they then moved to his Earth spiritual root where they began affecting it. However, since his root was already improved by them once, they didn\'t really affect it anymore. Not to mention the fact that the energy in the pill itself was way too weak for it to be effective anyway.

Having refreshed his memories on the pill, especially with his improved senses, he now had to translate everything to the Saint rank. Meaning the energy he felt, the ingredients he used, everything would have to be ranked up to the same level as a Saint rank pill.

\'Let\'s see…\' he thought as he felt the energy in the willow. He quickly got the energy constitution of the willow and used that information to find similar saint-rank ingredients.

There were tons of ingredients in his storage bag, some he was given by the council members, and some he found himself in the Orchard.

It took him the entire day to go through the whole the many earth element ingredient he had before he found about 6 ingredients that sort of made sense to be a better version of Willow\'s bark.

The only problem now was finding out which one of the 6 was truly the best one. Even amongst the 6, there were 2 very close ingredients that Alex started with.

He made the pills with just those two pills at first while being as close to the original recipe as possible.

The shape of the powder wasn\'t something he had learned yet, so he couldn\'t do it as well as he would have wanted it to. In the end, the first pill came out to be around 59%.

"That\'s alright, I should focus on figuring out whether the pill works or not before fixing the pill itself," he thought. That was slightly problematic for sure as he couldn\'t guarantee whether or not the pill did anything bad to him.

"Sigh, I will have to make a Nullifying pill for this as well," he thought. Before making those, he made the rest of the pills with the remaining 5 ingredients, each of which came out to be about the same range as the first one.

By the time he was done making all the pills, he felt tired. More tired than he would have been normally just making the pills. The mental exhaustion from having to sort through the many ingredients was hitting him harder than he had expected.

He sat on his bed and ate a cultivation pill before starting to cultivate. For the next 2 days, he spent the entire time just cultivating. He could feel that he was getting so close to breaking through once again.

\'Not even a year has passed since the last time and yet…\' he thought.

Once he was done cultivating, Alex got back to work. He prepared his ingredients to make the second-best Saint Nullifying pill he could make since pill veins were out of the question at the moment.

Saint Nullifying pills were immensely volatile and could get destroyed at any moment if one was not careful. So, Alex had to make sure he was very careful while he made it.

He made sure to move the ingredients no more than they were required and even after he did, he carefully controlled the energy before combining them all to make a pill.

The moment he completed making the pill, he immediately took the pill bottle that was next to him and dumped the pill inside directly into his mouth.

He swallowed the pill and quickly brought out the Saint Nullifying pill as he got ready to use it. He closed his eyes and felt the energy that was inside his belly at the moment.

The energy released from the pill made its way into his bloodstream. From there, they would go to the locations where his blood vessels and meridians were connected. Using the meridians, they would then go to his dantian and—

Something went wrong.

The energy went right past the meridian and continued down his bloodstream to go somewhere else.

Instantly, Alex at the pill in his hand and used its energy as fast as he could. The nullifying energy flowed through his body, countering every other energy in him. Within seconds, the energy from the Earth pill was completely destroyed by the nullifying pill.

Alex felt very drained when all the energy in his body was gone. "That wasn\'t right," he thought. The nullifying pill had gotten rid of more energy than just the pill, so he didn\'t want to start right away.

He spent a bit of time trying to understand what went wrong and what the pill was actually trying to do. He got some idea, but the only way to know if they were real was to test them completely on himself or on pill swine. He would rather do it on pill swine than himself.

After a while, once his meridians weren\'t so drained of Qi, he started making the Saint Nullifying pill once again.

He kept the 2nd pill ready to eat and finished making the nullifying pill. As soon as he was done, he ate the Earth element pill. Once again, the energy from the pill entered his bloodstream and he watched where it went.

It went through his vessels and right at where it was supposed to take the turn to enter his meridians… it did. It went through his meridians down to his dantian.

Alex slowly placed the nullifying pill in his mouth, ready at any moment. He felt the energy reach his dantian through the non-elemental spiritual root, and once it was inside, it started moving toward the Earth elemental spiritual root.

Alex swallowed the nullifying pill right before it was about to take effect and canceled out the energy that was in his dantian, even getting rid of some of the Qi that was inside of him.

"Phew!" Alex took a deep breath as that was way too close for him to be comfortable at the moment. If he had let it go any further, his spiritual roots would have been improved, that too by a pill that was barely in the Heaven grade.

However, even with that, he couldn\'t stop a smile from appearing on his face.

"I did it!" he thought.

He looked at the other 4 pills he still had to check and wondered if he should try them out as well.

Since there was nothing wrong with doing so, he spent the rest of the day testing them. In the end, the 2nd pill was the only one that worked. As such, that became the new Saint Earth Spiritual Root enhancing pill.

Once he was done completing the recipe, his next task was to improve said recipe so that he could make one with pill veins in them.

It took Alex about 2 days to completely learn the various powdered structure and form a composition that worked best for that recipe.

Once he was done, he started making the pills. He made the pills day after day for the entire week until he no longer had any ingredients for the pill anymore.

Only then did he leave his room and met up with the two elders that were currently out.

"Senior Liang, senior Hou," Alex greeted the elders.

The two elders looked at Alex and smiled. "Did you need something little brother?" they asked.

"I have a pill here that I believe you guys will like," Alex said as he brought out the storage bag that was full of pills.

"What pill is this? Is this the water spiritual root one?" Liang asked.

Alex shook his head. "I will still have to work on that," he said. "But this is not that different from it. These are pills that will improve your Earth spiritual roots. I do not know how many of you have it, but this will help any of you who have it a lot."

"Wait, did you really end up making these?" Hou Xinya couldn\'t help but put on a surprised face.

"Yes, senior," Alex said. "It\'s a shame I took such a long time, but at least it\'s here."

"What? Nonsense. You took what? 5 months? That\'s nothing," Liang Shufen said. "You could have brought this to us a decade later and we would have told you that you didn\'t have to hurry."

Alex gave a small smile and thanked them for their kind words. "Please share it with the others," he said. "Also, I was hoping you could help me with selling the rest. I can\'t leave the city, so I don\'t know how to do it myself."

"Don\'t worry, we will do it," Liang Shufen said.

"Thank you," Alex said. "Now, if you will excuse me, I have a small thing I\'ve been ignoring for some time that I will have to attend to."

Hou Xinya gave a weird look. "Are you leaving the palace?" he asked.

Alex nodded. "I need to go to the Insight pavilion."