Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

After a lot of deliberation of what he should make, he decided to start with something small, but useful.

A storage bag.

A storage bag consisted of exactly 1 material. A leather from any beast that could handle Qi lines.

Alex had a small circular piece of leather that was about 20 centimeters in diameter in front of him, and a random piece of string to tie the pouch.

The leather came from the skin of a Stringhorned Deer and was an above-average leather when it came to making storage pouches.

He remembered the method to make a storage bag.

First, he had to make circular Qi lines inside the leather while heating it up to make it possible. Then he had to tie up the pouch and plate it on the formation. Then, he needed to activate the formation.

  He didn't have a formation, but he didn't need it. Compared to other people, Alex was going to have an easier time with this for sure.

He was in a private room, so he had nothing to worry about and started making the artifact.

First, he took the leather and started pouring Qi lines into it. The Qi lines were slightly complicated, but Alex found them easy to form. The heat required came from his Dao and it easily helped him keep the leather hot and highly flexible without burning it.

With the heat in control, he made multiple Qi lines through the entire leather. The more Qi lines he made, the larger the storage would be, so he only stopped when there was no more space.

Once he was done with making Qi lines, he let the leather rest and cool down as the Qi lines were set up. Alex sped up the process slightly, but not a lot as he didn't want the leather to start having cracks in it. That would destroy the entire thing.

After a few minutes, it completely cooled down, so Alex wrapped it around with the string, making it look like a normal storage pouch. However, it couldn't store in objects just yet.

It didn't have any space in it.

That was where the formation would come in, but Alex didn't need a formation to use space. 

The moment he started using his Dao, the space inside the room started turning and twisting as it was slowly pinched and threaded into the storage bag.

At the same time, Alex started pouring Qi into the leather to activate the Qi lines in there.

As the Space went in, the Qi lines started holding onto it. That was a quirk of the beast leather that made it possible for Qi lines to be used in a certain fashion.

Each Qi line could only hold so much space, however, so after a while, it started rejecting Qi that was poured into it one by one. 

Alex continued pouring in the Qi and space until the storage bag could no longer handle any more space. When he realized his Qi was being rejected due to the lack of any functional Qi lines, he stopped.

He also stopped dragging in the space. The moment he did so, the excess space burst out into the room, shaking it a bit before passing through the objects, replacing the space within them.

Alex ignored that and looked at the storage bag he had made. 

The storage bag looked no different from the millions of other storage bags he had seen. The leather and strings' color were always different, but fundamentally, they were always just storage bags.

Alex then poured Qi into the storage bag and realized that it was surprisingly quite big. He had managed to add a bit more Qi lines than an average cultivator most likely could, so it turned out better than most.

The storage bag had enough space to hold something as large as two spirit veins coiled together. It was as big as one of the larger storage bags that could be bought in the market. 

If Alex wanted to make a larger storage bag, he would have to use leather that could function much better with the Qi lines, as well as make more Qi lines, which would require the leather to be slightly larger.

Once he was done, he reviewed his work for a while before being satisfied with it. 

Once that was over, he started moving on to bigger things one by one.

The next item Alex made a few days later was a pill tester. For a pill tester, whether it used fog or directly showed the harmony of the pill, he needed 3 things.

A glass container where the pill would go, a formation that actually tested the pill, and a small metal compartment that connected the two. 

Alex could've used any sort of glass from outside, but he decided to make it on his own. He learned to forge glass and then blow it into shape. However, it was only later that he realized that he didn't need to do that sort of thing.

The glass came from sands which were part of Earth. And as someone who had recently learned the Dao of Earth, Alex could freely manipulate it to a certain degree to whatever shape he wanted it to be, as long as no one had any Qi or Intent acting on it.

Once he made the glass, he made the compartment that would attach to the glass. It required some Qi lines which he added and then moved on to making the formation, which was beyond simple. He carved the formation himself and attached it to the back of the glass where a metal compartment was already attached beforehand.

Once that was done, he placed the spirit stones into the metal compartment and closed it.

The formation remained idle when there was nothing to test. When a pill was finally placed, the Qi lines recognized something was different and took in QI around them and activated the formation that immediately gave the Harmony of the pill.

Alex tried it with the pills he had and found that it was quite accurate, which meant that another one of his artifacts was successful. 

After a bit of testing, he agreed with the information he had learned about the lifetime of the pill vessel. It had said that on a single spirit stone, it could last for months of very active usage, and years of passive usage.

It seemed true.

Alex spent the next couple of months making bigger and bigger things, even going so far as to make swords that were just as good as Midnight, without the artifact spirit in them of course.

After he was certain he knew a lot, he finally decided to take a test and on the very first test, he surprised the teachers after reaching Level 6 at once.

Once he achieved that, Alex happily left the school as he had no longer much need for it.