Alex returned back to his house learning a great many things about his pills. Among the 9 new pills he had, he already got rid of 5 of them and had only kept the remaining 4 as a choice for improving.
Even amongst them, there were really just 2 that he cared about.
The pill for the nail was something he really liked, especially when considering that the beasts could use it to have stronger and longer claws. It was basically like adding weapons to their claws. If he improved on that pill, he could surely sell it to people that had beasts and would love for them to get stronger.
The next pill he cared about was obviously the pill that gave the swines intelligence. The fact that it increased the mental capabilities of the swine, he fully expected it to increase the strength of the water in his spiritual sea as well. He was now hopeful about increasing the reach of his spiritual sense and couldn't wait to acquire the pill.
As for the pill that made someone sweat faster and the pill that increased a person's heartbeat, basically doping them, he was still on the fence about them being useful at all.
"Whatever, I need to worry about this mental pill alone," Alex thought. "How many Bright Soul grasses did I get yesterday?" he quickly rummaged through his storage bag to check.
In total, after nearly 8 hours of scouring the forest, he had acquired about 32 Bright Soul Grasses. While that number sounded quite high, it wouldn't last him through the whole night if he tried to experiment with the pill to improve it.
"I don't know if there is reduced effect with each pill use like how most of the permanent pills have, so I need to make sure I only eat the best of the best pill," Alex thought.
Nodding to himself, he went to check on his master again. After learning that she was sound asleep, he went to the Southern Forest once more.
He called out Pearl who came out of the tattoo saying "Meow". Alex heard 'Brother' in his mind again and smiled.
He then quickly checked Pearl's nails and saw that the claws were still sticking out of his paws. 'So it doesn't disappear after staying in the beast space either huh?' he thought.
"Do you want to fight again?" he asked.
"YES!" Pearl's voice resounded in his mind.
They went through the forest once more, finding many different Alchemy ingredients and high-level monsters. Alex could now easily fight anything that was below the Mind Tempering realm. With beasts in the 1st realm of Mind Tempering, his victory chances went down by a lot as that was a whole Minor Realm above his own.
Also, beasts got way more intelligent in the Mind Tempering realm and most of the time just ran away when they saw that they couldn't win.
So, the most Alex could do was test his sword Intent here and there on beasts that were willing to fight against him. He felt like he got a little bit stronger with his Intent, but not much.
He needed that feeling of fighting with someone strong once again to hone it better.
Pearl on the other hand was having the time of his life. The only thing he was angry about was that after killing each beast, he wanted to eat their core, but the core would automatically get transported to one of Alex's storage bags at random, and he would be left with nothing.
Quite a few times, he caused ruckus like the little child he was for not getting the core. His instinct told him to eat whatever was inside, but once he didn't find anything, he no longer knew what to do.
'I will have to teach him that he won't get a core to eat through his killing as long as he is with me,' Alex thought. But then, he thought of something else.
'Wait, how does the core even get transported to me?' he thought. That led him to question how the names of things floating on top of them worked, which led to an entire can of worms opening that made him question how every single 'game' aspect of this world worked.
"Other people don't get that. So why only the players?" Alex wondered. "Whatever, I will worry about that later. I should finish this quick and return," he thought.
So, he spent the next two hours the other way around and got as many ingredients as he could. By the time he had left the forest, he had gathered about 40 more of the Bright Soul Grasses and that was enough for him to do some experiments to improve some of the aspects of it.
He quickly returned back to the sect and went to his house. He looked at the time and realized he had about 3 more hours of time to test the pill.
He deliberated for a moment on whether to use his actual cauldron or use a black cauldron. After a few minutes of thinking, he decided to go with the black one.
Once the cauldron heated enough, he put in the first ingredient. He decided to follow the best recipe he had at the moment since he didn't have another pill with him to check the differences.
Since he had to test out the heating speed, and energy release rate at every level, he had destroyed quite a few of these ingredients.
Bright Soul grass was quite expensive in comparison to the other basic ingredients he used and he was even deliberating on changing the ingredients. However, that was something he would test later, or ask other people.
He didn't know how the pill changed just because one ingredient was changed, and he didn't want to take that risk right now. He had something good in his hand, he wasn't going to want to change it for anything else.
Besides, it was a simple pill with around 10 ingredients. He didn't need to try really hard to get something right with how many times he was going to try.
He stuck to the recipe and successfully made the first pill. The pill had a slightly blue hue to an overall light brown pill. He checked the Harmony of the pill and without much surprise, it was around 16%.
That was all he had done back in the forest before he had moved onto a different pill once he made the third set of changes.
Now, he was going to continue from where he left off. Without hesitation, he half-crushed the pill and checked the Structure and Composition again.
"I still don't get any information from this," he thought and started making another pill. This time, he remembered the different variations of energy release and used a different one for the first ingredient.
The pill came out a little worse than the one before.
"Ok, again," he thought and changed the second ingredient's variation. This one came out a little better than the first one.
"Alright, this is the norm now," he thought and kept the 2nd ingredient's instruction the same, and changed the one for the third ingredient.
Similarly, he tried for a dozen or so times before he made a pill with the highest harmony as of yet, 29%. That was the best he could do in the 3 hours he had.
"Time to leave," he thought. Before that, however, he went to check on his master one more time. As he expected, she was still asleep.
"Second elder said it was only going to take a short while. Why is it taking so long?" he wondered.
He quickly logged out and started his next assignment. This one was a little hard, but he had the next 3 days after today free, so he was in no hurry.
He went to his classes and returned back. Then, without wasting a lot of time in real life, he went directly back into the game.
Once he was in, he went directly to check on his master. After returning, he directly entered his alchemy room and started doing what he was doing this morning.
He had changed the recipe so much that it was unrecognizable, aside from the ingredients themselves. He continued changing from that again.
He changed the direction the 4th ingredient moved in, then he changed the 5th ingredient's speed at which it moved inside the cauldron. Once he saw that the 2nd change resulted in a worse pill, he reverted and changed something else.
Since he didn't know much about the structure of the powder, he was going to wing it until he got lucky.
As for the composition, he did his best and made the pill using every single speck of powder that was inside the cauldron, whether it was freely available or hidden in some nook and corner. He went through the cauldron thoroughly and made sure to not miss a single bit of any ingredient.
That had really helped him in making the pill have higher Harmony. Still, he didn't know how much improvement was the composition, and how much of it was the structure of the powder particles.
He had no choice but to leave everything up to luck. At least until his master woke up and explained it to him.
"I hope master knows it at least. She did act like she understood what the Royal Alchemist meant when I told her about what he had said," Alex thought.
However, while he was hopeful, he was fully expecting her to not know either. If she knew about it, then there would be no reason why the Second Elder shouldn't know about it. But clearly, as Zhou Mei had said, even her Master didn't know about them.
"I can't do anything but just try," he thought and grind until midnight. After midnight, he felt his body just did not have enough Qi to make the pills anymore. He might have been able to make pills for a much longer time had he taken it slow.
But, since it was just making the same pill over and over again with only a slight change each time, he couldn't stop himself from doing it at the speed he did.
By midnight, he had around 8 hours of pill-making under him of the day, with over 60 pills made during the time. About 15 of those pills were made by the pill splitting into two.
'How can a pill that can not hold all the energy within it, hold it all when it is split into two?' Alex questioned. He had been questioning this for quite a while, but now that he learned more, he decided to see if he knew anything new.
He decided to check the pill with his spiritual sense. When he focused on the pill with high concentration to see minute particles, he was shocked.
"Hollow?" he thought in surprise. Hollow was perhaps not the correct term, but the pill was definitely not as packed as when it was just a single pill.
He tried to understand it, but he was just too fatigued at this point. "Sigh, let me just cultivate for the night," he thought.
He called out Pearl and asked him to cultivate. However, before that, he popped a monster core into his mouth and fought the monster in the spiritual sea.
Once the beast was dead and the yellow fog swallowed it all, he gained quite a bit of Qi. Using that, he broke through to the 7th Meridian tempering realm.
He felt that the speed was quite fast, but when compared to the other players, it was slow.
He asked Pearl to start, and soon, he too started and fell into a deep trance before going unconscious.
Early in the morning, he finally woke up again. He thought he heard someone speaking close to him and slowly opened up his eyes.
In front of him was a figure sitting in a lotus position, watching over him.
"Oh, Did you wake up?"
Alex's eyes immediately went wide in full joy and happiness.
"Master!"
