Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

"Brother Shen? What are you doing here?" he couldn\'t help but ask.

"I was waiting for you to come out," Bai Jingshen said. "I wanted to ask a few questions."

"Oh, okay," Alex said.

Bai Jingshen carefully looked at Alex and nodded to himself. "You don\'t feel anything wrong with your body, do you? You did breakthrough 5 times in a row in a small period of time," he said

"I\'m… mostly fine," Alex said. "I probably need to spend a few weeks or even months cultivating to make sure there are no problems, but there isn\'t anything wrong with the cultivation base itself."

"It was probably because absorbing so much blood was a daring task, it sort of fixed most of the problems that came with breaking through too quickly."

Bai Jingshen nodded after hearing that. "That\'s a relief," he said. "It would be bad if you made cracks in your foundation at this stage."

"I know, brother Shen. I would\'ve stopped if I had felt something was wrong," Alex said.

"Oh yeah, congratulations on learning a new dao," Bai Jingshen said. "If you don\'t mind, what dao did you learn exactly?"

"It\'s the dao of Blood aura," Alex explained. "I should be thanking you for that actually. If not for the immortal blood that was almost impossible to absorb, I wouldn\'t have to force myself into trying so hard. Because of that, I ended up learning the mysteries behind the blood aura and now learned its dao."

Bai Jingshen was surprised to hear that. "I thought it was only the worldly laws that helped you, but I\'m happy to hear I could be of some help too," he said. "Did you absorb all of it?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I absorbed the most I could into my cultivation base and absorbed the rest into my blood. Although, I\'m not certain I absorbed it all. There was just too much and I might have missed a lot of it."

"As long as you absorbed the most you could, that\'s fine," Bai Jingshen said. "Alright, come with me and rest a little."

Alex nodded and walked along with Bai Jingshen as he was taken to the garden aboveground.

"Is Pearl…"

"Not yet," Bai Jingshen said. "It seems he wants to take his sweet time."

Alex felt a little dejected when he heard that. "How long was I inside exactly?" he asked.

"Uhh… about a week or so," Bai Jingshen said.

"Huh…" Alex thought. He felt as if he was in there for months. It was truly something to cultivate in rooms with intense time dilation. "Do you know why everyone doesn\'t just cultivate in rooms with time dilation, Brother Shen? That seems like an obvious choice." 

"Because your progress would mostly remain the same," Bai Jingshen said. "Just think about what you need to cultivate. There are 2."

Alex thought for a moment. As he did, the answer to his question suddenly became obvious.

"Ah, I see," he said. "Qi takes time to get into a room, huh?"

Bai Jingshen nodded in response.

Cultivating in a room where time moved faster than it did outside was not fruitful since you would quickly run out of Qi in the room and the Qi outside wouldn\'t be able to replace it in time. 

As a result, even if you could cultivate faster, the resource necessary for cultivation itself remained the same overall.

Unless you had a lot of spirit stones or treasures to aid your cultivation, cultivating in such conditions made little to no difference at all.

\'No wonder no one really uses it,\' he thought. \'Even a saint will have to use thousands of saint spirit stones to make any use out of the sped-up time.\'

Cultivating in such a way was a drain on resources when others could gain the same result without using any. Alex himself could only make use of the sped-up time because he had so much blood to make use of.

"Oh right, the teleport formation was fixed yesterday. We are ready to send everyone away," Bai Jingshen said.

"Is that so," Alex said. "Has anyone been sent to inform the humans about it?"

"We are going to today," Bai Jingshen. "Hao Ya is ready to leave to talk with the humans in the Crimson Empire. I will most likely go and talk with the human from the Luminance empire."

"Do you want to go yourself?" Alex asked with a surprised look. 

"Not really," Bai Jingshen said. "But I just thought it might be the quickest way."

"Oh, then you don\'t have to bother. I\'m going to the Luminance Empire anyway, so I can do that while I am there," Alex said.

"Are you sure?" Bai Jingshen asked. 

"Yes," Alex said. "Although, I might have to stop making pills for a while."

"Don\'t worry about the pills," Bai Jingshen said. "There will be plenty of time to make those after you come back. After all, it isn\'t so easy to gather all the humans from those two backwater empires. It will take days for the news to even travel everywhere and weeks for everyone to gather back here."

Alex nodded in understanding. He knew it would take a long time from the very start. They had planned for all of it after all.

The two talked while they arrived out in the outer garden. Helen, Scarlet, and the others were waiting for Alex to come out.

"Wow! You really did break through to the Saint Core 5th realm huh?" Scarlet couldn\'t help but say. "Is your foundation stable?"

"Stable enough," Alex answered.

"What was that dao?" Hao Ya couldn\'t help but ask. "You did learn a dao, right?"

"Yes, dao of Blood Aura," Alex explained.

"Blood aura?" Neither Liz nor Hao Ya understood what it meant to know dao of such an aura. "Is it useful?"

"It\'s useful to me," Alex said. "I can\'t tell how useful it can be in battle just yet, but I have no doubts it will be."

"It\'s a unique dao for sure," Scarlet said. 

"Anyway, I heard you two were able to fix the teleportation formation," Alex said. "We got a message back from senior Yang?"

"Yes, we are ready to go," Hao Ya said. "I\'m going over to talk to the emperor of the empire in the north."

"We?" Alex looked around. "Oh, are you going too, Aunt Liz?" 

Liz nodded. "After we\'re done informing, I\'ll go stay with Ronron and the rest until you guys return," she said.

"Alright," Alex said. "That might be for the best."

As they talked for a bit, a plan started forming. Alex and Helen were going to go to the Luminance Empire while Liz and Hao Ya would deal with the Crimson Empire.

Once they were all prepared, they got ready to leave as soon as possible.

"I\'m coming with you," Scarlet said and became as small as a parrot before climbing onto Alex\'s shoulders. "I\'ve been here too long and I want to see what the rest of this continent looks like."

"Sure," Alex said. "Let\'s go."