"No!" Alex screamed. "Pearl! Pearl!," he shouted out loud. The space shifted on him too soon and he couldn't grab onto Pearl on time.
"Meow!" a sound came from somewhere. Alex couldn't tell what direction it was from or what distance away it was either. However, hearing the sound, he got relieved.
"Hah! I overreacted," he said out loud. Once he calmed down, he decided to search for Pearl. He wondered which direction he should start with when he realized that he could feel a certain connection with Pearl that transcended the disorientation of the formation.
'I can fell him through our bond,' he thought.
He closed his eyes, hearing and other senses as well as took back his spiritual sense. After that, he started walking in the direction of Pearl.
Before he knew it, he could hear a rather loud 'Meow' coming from right next to him.
"Hey, buddy. I thought you would be lost for a while. It seems we can find each other with our bond," Alex said.
"Meow," Pearl replied.
"Did you get the core?" he asked.
"Meow," Pearl nodded.
"Good," Alex said. "Alright, time to break through."
He opened up his status page and clicked on breakthrough. He felt his cultivation base elevate as he entered the 7th realm of Organ Tempering.
'Just a little more. If I train rigorously for the next week or two, I should be able to enter the Meridian tempering realm,' he thought.
He then dug a hole and put his formation plage and spirit stones inside it. After providing some Qi to activate it, a fire started burning on top of the formation.
Alex took out a cauldron, but it was not his Golden Jade cauldron. Instead, he took out one of the black, disposable cauldrons. He wasn't going to make pills today.
Instead, he was going to learn interactions between the ingredients and based on that, make a new pill of his own. He didn't know how long that was going to take for him to learn, but he was going to try it for as long as it was required.
He didn't immediately start adding in random ingredients. He started with some pills whose recipe he was very familiar with.
The first thing he did was recall every single thing he could about those ingredients. It wasn't very long before he learned that he actually didn't know much about the ingredients themselves, but knew quite a lot about the pills they made.
So, he decided to start with making the pills. He put in the first ingredient and waited for its energy to release. Once the energy was released, Alex used his spiritual sense to try to sense the energy. He learned that the first ingredient produced Fire energy.
He then put in the second ingredient and tried to sense what energy was being released. "Hmm… this is… earth right? Yeah, this is earth," Alex thought as he felt a new energy.
He could tell that the Earth energy wasn't as strong as the fire energy, but… he had a feeling he knew what was going to happen.
"Earth is going to get stronger, isn't it?" he thought. It was like he half knew the answer and the other half guessed it. The earth energy should have been not as strong considering how strong the fire energy was.
However, instead of the fire energy messing with the earth energy, it helped it grow, and soon all that was left was very strong earth energy.
Alex's eyes shined when he realized what had happened. "The fire energy empowered the earth energy. So I CAN use the elemental theory from the fights while making pills as well," he thought.
The next ingredient he put in produced wood energy. He sensed the energy it output and guessed what would happen. "Hmm, the earth energy is so strong, so it should destroy the wood energy right?" he thought.
He was correct. The Earth energy did in fact soon destroy all of the wood energy. However, in doing so, it was also reduced by a fair bit in amount.
"Hmm… I can understand the wood energy is gone, but where exactly did it go? How is the energy disappearing? It's not like they should cancel each other, right? Even if they did, there shouldn't be a net loss in energy" he thought.
He was a bit confused but decided to follow the pill recipe. Everything went exactly how he planned it to, but the energies would randomly increase in amount or decrease in an amount from time to time, which confused him a lot.
Finally, he finished making the pill and the harmony came out to be around 25%.
"Eh, that's not bad since I'm making on a disposable cauldron," Alex thought. For the rest of the night, he decided to continue making pills in a similar way.
He wanted to learn exactly how the energy interacted, and most of all, why the energy was randomly disappearing and reappearing.
He tried to find answers throughout the night, and it wasn't until 3 am when he finally realized something.
"I see… so the energy isn't disappearing when they get weakened or ruined, but instead they go into a state of balance with the other energies, and the elements are no longer given off their aura."
"But when I put in another ingredient that can control or overwhelm the weaker element of the two, or empower the stronger one, the initial energy comes back and it gives off the impression of energies randomly appearing," he thought.
That felt like the right explanation to him. "So, I not only have to keep track of what energy is currently in the cauldron but also every single other energy that I put in before it," he thought.
"Well, I at least have to keep track of the ones that vanished." He continued making the pills and learning more and more as he went along.
He tried multiple recipes and understood the things that took place inside the cauldron. Finally, he stopped only when daybreak arrived.
