Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

With one recipe complete, Alex began forming the next one.

As he took his time with it and let his mind roam through the myriad possibilities that existed with these ingredients, his ideas slowly began focusing on the next group of possibilities.

Taking his time with it, Alex gathered his thoughts on what the next pill was going to be. From the looks of it, he was going to use the Golden Mind Chrysanthemum, so the pill likely would have something to do with mental strength.

Based on the group of ingredients he was going to use, he could tell they would surely let the metal energy in the chrysanthemum flourish. As for how it was going to be, Alex would have to do it all by himself.

He spent more than an hour or two going through the ingredients, trying to see the right order. It took multiple tries of simultaneously going through the ingredients' energy mixing and properties mixing to finally land on one that made sense.

Once he had that done, the next steps were simple. Less than an hour after that, Alex had another pill ready.

This pill used the Golden Mind Chrysanthemum as its major ingredient to heal the mind of the person who ate it. It cleared any poison or venom that affected one's mind and helped rejuvenate their spirit.

It was not a unique recipe, sadly, but it was a good one.

Alex formed it into a pill sometime later, and it came out to be at 41%. That was somewhat better than the first pill but still quite laughable.

As soon as he was done with it, Alex moved on to the next recipe.

Once again, he cleared his mind and began finding the next recipe.

This time, it took much longer than he would have expected to come across a group of working ingredients.

Perhaps because of the previous two recipes, his mind subconsciously wanted to make more pills like them. He knew how they worked now, so with a few tweaks here and there, he could most likely make a different recipe.

However, the recipe would not be so drastically different that it could count for the tournament. Each recipe had to be completely unique, at least based on what major ingredient it used. So he couldn't let his previous knowledge drag him back toward it.

Adding a bit of focus to his thoughts, Alex began searching for the third recipe. It took longer than the first two times, but he found another simple recipe once again.

Alex had a hunch that if he used the Nine Star Jewel Fruit, he could use the Earth energy within it to make a defensive pill. So, he followed that direction and soon gathered what he believed to be the right ingredients for that.

Some hours later, he had the recipe ready. Using the major ingredient, Nine Star Jewel Fruit, Alex made a pill that could greatly enhance one's physical hardness, greatly amplifying their physical defense.

Alex couldn't tell exactly how well it would improve one's defense without forming the actual pill with 100% harmony, but even from the 35% pill he did make, he could tell that eating the pill could help a new Immortal Realm cultivator survive a single attack against an Immortal Transcendent Realm attacker.

Now that all three pills were ready, Alex called over the man that stood outside of his small space. The Divinity entered with a look of surprise.

"Are you done?" he asked.

"Yes, here are the pills and recipes, Senior." Alex handed over all three.

The man took them and right there began to look through them. He had a medallion in his hand that he used to compare the recipes. He took a few minutes to check it thoroughly, and Alex waited for him to be done with it.

After just a short time, the man nodded. "You have successfully made all three recipes. Congratulations on passing to the next phase of the competition."

"Thank you, Senior."

The man walked out, leaving Alex alone.

Now that he was done with the task, Alex didn't feel like immediately going back to make more recipes. He felt somewhat drained, so he wanted to fix that.

Alex took a small break, just a short respite from the constant work he had been doing for however long. He did wonder how much time had passed since he started.

Normally, a cultivator would have a very good grasp of time, but in Alex's case, the fact that he could sense Time aura made it difficult. The constant aura of Time stagnation was problematic enough, but the fact that he somewhat understood the Dao of Temporal Awareness made things worse rather than helping. Read exclusive chapters at My Virtual Library Empire

The Medicine World flowed at a different rate of time than the entire world, and the space he was in flowed at a different rate than the Medicine World. It was frankly quite annoying.

Thankfully, he didn't have to guess. He looked to the sky in search of the hovering timer and noticed that just over 15 hours had passed at this point. If he hadn't seen that, he could have sworn that it had been no more than 12 hours.

'15… so it's been more like 16 and a half hours for me,' Alex thought. It was surprising how much time had passed. He noticed something else in the sky—a list of names that had been hovering there since the beginning.

There were seven names there, with his at the end. The next two names were a set of decent alchemists in the tournament that Alex had heard about, Treegold and Eightsnow. Above those two was Leafheart in the fourth spot, and Dusklily was at third above her.

In second place was Faithseeker. And at the top was Palesilver.

Alex was quite surprised by how quickly those two had made their recipes. It was suspiciously fast that they ended up creating three recipes.

Had they gotten lucky, or was there some sort of technique?

He did rank seventh, so he wasn't disappointed or anything. He was just surprised. And of course, just because they were fast didn't mean they were good with refining too. That was the part where he truly shined.

Alex decided to continue making more recipes, but before he did so, there was something else he needed to do first. The recipes needed refining, and for that, he needed to understand everything about the ingredients by themselves, such as all of their structures and energy release rates.

Alex didn't cut any corners in this part, as this was going to decide how good his pills ended up being for the remainder of the competition. Even if he did think he knew the ingredients, he went through them again, making sure everything was up to order.

Another five hours later, he had gone through everything. At this point, for each ingredient, he could tell the exact temperature and refinement method he would need to use to release their energy at a certain rate while making sure the grains of the powder took on a certain shape.

With all of this in his mind, Alex proceeded to make the next set of recipes.