"Hmm," Yao Jia thought. "Why do you want it?"
"I… need it for some pills I might be making," Alex lied.
"Hmm, maybe you can trade for it? I really don't know if anyone would be willing to part with it though since they can all use monster cores in some manner for themselves," Yao Jia said.
"Hmm… trade huh? I should be able to work with that," he thought. "Alright, I will think of something. I will probably have to sell some pills for sure."
"Okay, do that," Yao Jia said. She didn't really know much about pills and was quite interested in it as well.
"Oh, uncle Teng is out," she said and got up from the meadow. "Let's go."
"Umm… Uncle Teng is… senior Puma?" Alex asked.
"Yes. Let's hurry, he gets annoyed if he is made to wait too long," Yao Jia said.
"I heard that," the Puma's voice sounded inside both of their heads.
"Why do you think I spoke out loud?" Yao Jia asked jokingly.
"Hurry up. I don't think this child likes me very much," he said.
They walked back into the underground palace and made their way back to the room where they had left behind Pearl.
As soon as they reached, the door opened and Pearl came flying out. "Meow!" he complained that he was left here for so long without Alex being nearby.
"Did he do something that hurt you?" Alex asked.
"MEOW!!" Pearl complained.
A confused look appeared on Alex's face. "You… made him fight you? Were you testing his strength?"
"No, I was testing how close he was to awakening his bloodline, and from what I can see, he's quite close. Still, he is just a child so it will take a while without putting some direct pressure on him," the Puma said.
"I won't let you do that," Alex said as he held Pearl in his arms defensively.
"Relax, little human. I have no intentions of providing any stress to someone who might end up being my king. That would be a stupid way to get on the wrong side of the future King. Especially one that is this young, so he will grow to hate me for sure," the puma said.
"So, what's the verdict, uncle? Is he ready for the ritual?" Yao Jia asked.
"Hmm… not yet. He is both too young and too weak right now. We will have to wait until he is either at least 10 years old, or in the True realms, whichever comes first," the puma said. "But given his speed, it might be the True realms that come first. The lord's bloodline surely is amazing at how fast it can help him cultivate."
"What do we do now then?" Alex asked.
"Nothing. You can go back to your room or go roam where you are allowed. As long as you don't bother anyone or try to run away, you will be fine," the puma said.
"I see. Okay," Alex said and walked away. Yao Jia followed behind him and asked," You want to go somewhere else?"
"No, I will go back to my room and wait around for a bit," he said. "Let's see what your father and Lady Ren find from their visit to the library."
"Not a bad idea," Yao Jia said. "Let me show you back to your room."
"It's alright, I know the way," Alex said and left. He walked along with Pearl in his hands and went to his room to wait.
"Sigh, what do I do now?" he wondered.
"Oh right," he thought and looked at the ring he was wearing. "So this is a storage artifact huh? I wonder how much space they pushed into this gem," he wondered.
"Hmm, so how do I refine it again? I should try with my Qi right?" he thought and started pouring in his Qi to see if something would happen. Unfortunately, nothing did.
"Should I try my True Qi, then?" he wondered. He tried to pour in what remaining True Qi he had and failed to refine it even a little bit. In the first place, He didn't have much true Qi since he spent most of it, if not all, opening the formation to hide from the beasts back in the Tiger Sect.
"Sigh, nothing I can do about it right now. Let me arrange my storage bags then," he thought and brought out stuff from his storage bags.
He started with the alchemy bags and separated items by importance. He put the important ones into the wooden boxes and left the unimportant ones without any.
After he was done with them, he moved on to other things he had in his storage bags.
"Right, I will have to ask them if they can help me maybe refine this sword," he thought as he looked at the heavy, black sword in his storage bag.
He had only used this sword two times to kill two different people. One of them was intentional, and the other one was Song Zun.
"Maybe I can even trade it for something from this place?" he wondered. "No, they won't care about swords. What would beasts need swords for?"
He shook his head and put aside the bag with the sword and moved on to something else. He then sorted out the talismans he had and noticed one that he didn't remember seeing before.
"Hmm… what's this?" he thought and looked into it. It turned out to be just another formation blueprint that he might have missed reading. Or at least, that's what he thought at first.
However, the more he read it, the more confusing it got for him as the talisman didn't follow the normal pattern of a formation blueprint.
He directly looked at the design and his eyes went wide as he finally realized what it was.
"Did she perfect it?" Alex wondered as he properly read it this time around.
Luo Xing had improved upon the formation that Alex had acquired from Song Zun. The formation only had the drawing and nothing else, and the only other thing Alex even knew about this formation was that it didn't depend on anyone to activate it since Song Zun had used it in the Forbidden Fields.
Alex quickly read up on the information and started understanding what he had been doing wrong all this time.
As it turned out, to run the formation without any help from the setter, the ingredients that would be used to run it needed to be set up in a certain way as well.
Also, the energy that was going to be used as the pattern of the formations also needed to be uniform in size everywhere. That meant that places with too many strokes in the nodes needed to have more of that energy source as compared to ones that had less of it.
Unfortunately, that was all Luo Xing had figured out. And that was after conferring with Xiao Huang as well. Their information on how a metal-less formation was started exactly was still missing.
"If I don't have that, then I can't do much, can I?" Alex thought. However, then he remembered something.
"Right, the zebra, I should ask him," he thought. "Maybe he knows given the company he lives with here."
He would need to later request the jaguar or Lady Ren herself to ask for help from the zebra. That was now another task he had added onto himself.
"So I need to get cultivate to get stronger, make pills so I can get better at alchemy, hopefully, trade some monster cores, and finally learn a bit about formations from the zebra," he thought. "I will also have to ask about the black sword."
"Finally, I will have to request some duels so that I can train while I get stronger," he thought. "Since I have a lot of free time in coming, I will have to make the best use of it."
Once he planned all of this, he finished taking care of the storage bags. He took a look at that one talisman he still had no idea what it did.
"Yeah, I will have to ask them about this as well."
Once he was all done, he was about to log out since he had nothing else to do when suddenly he heard a voice in his head.
"Come to the Palace Hall," Lady Ren's voice sounded in his head. "And bring the child with you."
