Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

It was an acceptable handle if just for show or practice, but if he intended to use the sword in a real battle, the handle would be destroyed in no time.

Alex tried expanding the sword to how large it could get after it had been compounded to become smaller. The sword enlarged to become twice its size, but then it enlarged even more, which surprised Alex.

He tried shrinking it back, and he could force it to become stronger way past its actual size.

It took Alex a while to realize that he could enlarge and shrink the sword as he wished because that was the property of the Starforged tungsten, and not of Metal compounded.

Metal Compounding game had a similar result as well, but it could only expand to the volume of the metal used in compounding. It could also not shrink any further either.

Alex felt excited after learning the information and proceeded to do what Godslayer had told him to do. He made a hammer and an anvil.

He made the anvil out of 30 tons of ore, which ended up as 12 tons of pure tungsten. He refined it and compounded it twice to create the anvil.

He also put Qi lines in the anvil which made it exceptionally resilient to force and heat when it was filled with Qi. That would end up being very helpful when he made artifacts on top of it.

Normally, the anvil was about a meter long, half a meter wide, and half a meter tall. But Alex could expand it to work with larger pieces of metal.

As an anvil, he couldn’t make it too small or it would lose its purpose, and he couldn’t make it too big as it would end up being too soft to handle a metal being tempered.

The way he had made it was perfect.

He made the hammer out of 10 tons of metal, compounded to become nearly 5 times smaller in general. Even then, it looked bulky and unnaturally strong.

He asked Godslayer for any other bit of advice he could give during this process, but Godslayer was quite useless when not making a sword.

In the end, Alex ended up with a hammer that had regular Qi lines in it, but nothing special.

It had taken him quite a while to make the two, so to not bring the mad immortal’s wrath, Alex immediately went back to making pills.

After a week or so, he even managed to call forth the Pill cloud again, which he failed for not trying too hard.

The old man frowned, but he said nothing. “What do you want this time?” he asked with an annoyed look.

Alex thought for a moment but he couldn’t think of anything he wanted right then. Then, he remembered something Godslayer had said about gathering more information, so he decided to ask.

“Can you tell me about the Snow Immortal sect?” Alex asked. “How it was formed, and how it became a super sect?”

Alex’s intent was to learn more about the old man to find out if there was something wrong with him that they could exploit. He didn’t know much about what could be exploited, but certainly, Godslayer did.

“Oh,” the old man was surprised to hear Alex’s interest in the fallen sect. “You are interested now that you know you will become my heir if you succeed? Very well, where do I start?”

Seeing that the old man was in fact going to speak up, Alex called Godslayer to listen with him.

“I cannot say for certain for everything that happened in the past. Even as old as I am, I was only born 11 thousand years ago, while the Snow Immortal sect was formed over 30 thousand years ago, so some of the records are missing.”

“It was but a small sect before that, but our founder, Xue Yu’er managed to reign supreme over the entirety of the northern Continent and became regarded as one of the strongest figures in a generation.”

“Even without her wanting to, the Snow Immortal sect gathered so much influence thanks to her that it became a defacto leader of the entire continent.”

The old man remembered the glory days of the sect when he was but an outer disciple. He remembered the excited child from back then, that wanted to bring glory to his family.

“Our founder was worried that she had overstepped her boundary in the continent, as she could not rule the continent for there was a ruler already. So, she quickly broke through to the Immortal realm and ascended away from this world.”

“However, she did so not before finding herself an heir that could look after the sect in her absence, who would then become the sect leader.”

“After a few thousand years, that sect leader ascended to the heavens as well. Before he did, he had left another talented individual as the sect leader.”

“One after another, they kept ascending,” the old man said. “All the way until I was the sect leader, and then…”

“I failed,” he said quietly. “Everyone before me ascended to become an immortal, and yet… I failed. And with me ended the Snow Immortal sect as well.”

The old man’s left eye teared up a little, while his right eye didn’t even get the least bit moist.

Alex saw that the old man was starting to quiet down and wanted him to keep speaking. “Did the ancestors leave behind information about pill cloud, senior?” he asked. “Did the people from thousands of years ago successfully make pills that could clear pill clouds?”

The old man’s thoughts snapped back to reality as he looked at Alex. “Pill clouds? No, we had no idea what Pill Clouds were until about 9 thousand years ago.”

“Oh,” Alex was surprised. “Did someone manage to make pill clouds on their own like me?”

“No, we–” the old man paused for a second to think of whether he should be speaking about this or not. However, after a moment, he didn’t see why he couldn’t say it.

“We told her we would never tell anyone that wasn’t a sect leader or ancestor of the sect, but since you are my heir and the next sect leader, I think it is fine to tell you,” the old man said.

Alex leaned forward in anticipation to hear what the old man had to think so much about.

The old man remembered back to the day and said, “we know so much because our founder told us… 9 thousand years ago.”

Alex nodded once before stopping as the two pieces of information didn’t match. “Wait… your founder told you 9 thousand years ago? Wasn’t she supposed to have ascended already?” he asked.

“She did, nearly 30 thousand years ago,” the old man said. “But… she came back 9 thousand years ago to see the world that she had left behind.”

“Woah!” Alex let escape a voice of shock without even meaning to. “She came back? Have the other sect leaders come back too?”

The old man shook his head. “No, she said she only came back because she got the opportunity after winning some sort of competition she had taken part in.”

“Her arrival was a matter of great secrecy that only a few people in the sect knew about. The things she said when she had come, I still remember my shock when I heard about it.”

“She told us that when she first ascended, she tried to find herself a sect to join. But apparently, she could only join weak sects, as the stronger sects didn’t even take in newly ascended individuals as outer sect disciples.”

“What?” Alex was surprised as well.

“That was my reaction too. She told us about the pill clouds, about how immortals can’t break through without going through lightning tribulation, and just how abundant immortals were in the place she had ascended to,” the old man said.

“However, perhaps the thing that surprised me most of all was one thing she had said,” the old man remembered. “She said… that the sky had no stars.”

“No stars?” Alex was confused. “She said the sky had no star?”

“Yes. She said that this world has no stars. What we see in the night aren’t stars at all,” he said. “Everything that glitters in the sky is actually just another floating piece of rock just like our own. Some are big, and some are small.”

“The big ones are big enough that they are visible in the night sky, which we mistake for stars,” the old man said while shaking his head. “You should have seen the faces of the ancestors who learned that for the first time. It was as if their whole world had shattered in front of them.”

Alex could imagine what they were feeling, as he was feeling the same thing right now.

“Every single mortal makes the same mistake,” Godslayer said from inside his head, confirming the old man’s words.

“What shocked me the most was to learn that of those floating pieces of rocks that we mistook as stars, some of them are actually filled with life, with people just like us,” he said.

“Well, maybe better than us, for it turns out that of the worlds with life, there are a few that are capable of inhabiting humans that can reach immortality and higher realms without leaving that world.”

“That is to say that the mysterious and fabled immortal worlds that we had all been dreaming about had been right above us in the sky all along.”