Once he finished testing the different combinations, he decided to stop for the day. He was exhausted and needed to go for the driving training.
He left and only returned after It was 7 pm. Once he was back, he trained his skills for a little bit and exhausted his remaining Qi as well.
After that, he decided to just cultivate for the night.
He called Pearl back who was wandering the fog the whole time Alex was training. As soon as he came back, Alex asked him to start cultivating.
"Meow," Pearl said and started cultivating. Numerous cuts started appearing all over Alex's body.
"Hmm… it hurts a bit more than the previous days," he thought. "Did you by any chance… breakthrough?" Ning thought and opened Pearl's status page.
[White Cat (Child) - Bonded
Name: Pearl
Cultivation Base: Organ Tempering 1st realm
Evolution Chance: 40%
Cultivation Method: ????? ?????'s Dominating Body (Shared)
]
"Oh wow! You are already at Organ Tempering 1st realm. That means…. Sigh, I will need to start feeding you Organ Tempering realm beasts," Alex said.
"Hmm… maybe as a monster you can eat the cores without fighting whatever that mental projection is that I have to fight each time, but I still feel a little scared to feed them to you," Alex said.
Pearl was still a child, so he wasn't very strong mentally to fight against the monsters. Or at least that's what Alex believed. "Whatever, let's just cultivate quietly."
Very soon, Alex fell into a trance and fell unconscious.
Early in the morning, he woke up. His body wasn't feeling as much pain and he felt like he had advanced in body cultivation as well.
"My body probably matches Pearl's cultivation base. If only it was like Pearl's and my body and Qi cultivation was the same," Alex hoped.
He told Pearl to stop and let him go roam around. As for himself, he logged out.
He walked out of the capsule a little tired, but fine overall. He wasn't really hungry but could eat a little if need be. So, he freshened up and went to get breakfast.
Hannah was there as well, ready to eat breakfast. The two cousins were starting to have a timetable for eating in the morning.
Alex returned back to his room and logged into the game. The routine still stood. He trained with Pearl for a little while where he used his hands, legs, and swords to fight.
Once that was done, he got back to practicing alchemy.
"Hmm… what ingredient should I go for next?" Ning thought. There were way too many choices and he didn't know where to start with first.
"Ah, I should start with my pill's ingredients. Who knows, maybe the reason I have such little harmony in my pill is that I am using the wrong set of motion and temperature," he thought. Even after he had done his best, his highest was barely above Earth grade. So, it was pretty apparent that he hadn't made a good recipe.
So, he took out the first ingredient of his pill and started testing. He did numerous tests for the next 3 or 4 hours and finally tested every possible scenario.
Now that he didn't have to make a pill every time he came up with a new discovery, he was much faster. After he was done with the first ingredient, he moved on to the second one.
He had fortunately decided to use ingredients that he had a lot of, so he could do this testing for all the ingredients for his pill.
"Damn, I wonder how they perfected recipes for pills that require very rare ingredients. They probably didn't test the ingredients just like I am, right?" Alex wondered.
"I should ask master how they do that once I get out," he thought.
"Speaking of which, why is nobody here yet? Did they stop searching for me? … or did they just never start?" Alex wondered. "A massive fog in the middle of the southern forest shouldn't be that hard to find right?"
He remembered how uniquely visible the 5 elemental fog was back when Wen Cheng took him to the alchemy garden. "I hope they didn't stop, but… why can't they find me?" Alex started feeling a little sad.
SLAP
"Stop thinking about that. Both masters are good people. There are also others that care for me. They won't stop searching for me," Alex thought. He stopped thinking negatively and started practicing once more.
He tried the next pill ingredient and practiced with it for the next 3-4 hours. Once he was done with that, he trained in his techniques a bit more.
Afterward, he ate an Organ Tempering 9th realm monster's core.
Suddenly, he was transported to his spiritual sea. He felt a little scared when he realized that he had been fighting these monsters using his spiritual sense and that if he had ever mistakenly eaten one where his spiritual sea was nearly gone, he would have probably died.
"Did the spiritual sea get bigger?" he thought. He could swear that the size of the spiritual sea much about half a Spirit Cleansing Lily's worth bigger, but he didn't know why. He decided to ignore that for now.
He looked at the beast in front of him, an owl-like bird monster, and got ready to fight. As soon as the bird moved, he started sending dozens of palms and fist attacks towards the monster.
Within 5 minutes, it died.
"Hm… were my attacks stronger as well? Or am I just thinking that because they didn't do much against Zexi?" he thought.
Now that the bird was dead, he knew what was going to happen next. He looked down at the sea surface and waited for the yellow fog to rise up.
As he expected, the yellow fog did rise up from around a small shadow on the surface of the sea. Alex kept staring at the shadow not knowing what it was. Soon, the fog devoured the bird as well as him, and he disappeared.